English: 21st Century Language of the United States of America
Hear Ye, Hear Ye! Polyglots, Criers of Diversity, Champions of Globalization - and Americans
The one absolute certain way to bring this nation to ruin, or preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. ... We must...learn one language and that language is English. - Theodore Roosevelt
Americans: Where, Who, What, How
Where are the Americans? Who are they? What do they think? What do they want? How can we work together with them? How can we fall in love with them? Raise families? Make communities? Worship with them? Prosper? Pursue Life, Liberty, and Unalienable Rights? How can we make a future together? How will we know - if we can't understand them, or equally destructive and terminal, they can't understand us?
Essential Cornerstone of America
This is not an issue of diversity. This is not an issue of immigration. This is not an issue of "the global economy." This is an issue of the continuous and continuing dilution, minimalization, and erosion of an essential cornerstone of our great nation.
English is THE language of the United States of America. Don't like it, want to call up your ACLU rep, want to lobby against it - maybe stage a protest or demonstrate or march in the streets? Want to huddle up in your self-imposed linguistic ghetto of isolation and separation chanting the purity of your language and immutability of your culture? Get real. Get over it. English has been, is, and will be THE language of the United States of America.
To think it is necessary for cities and states to make legal through resolution and statute this cornerstone of our nation is unthinkable. To consider it a matter requiring an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America is the stuff of Marxian fantasy and Orwellian newspeak. And yet, these are issues in the political, economic, and sociological dyanmics of America 2007. (For example, see English as Our Official Language, U.S. English, Inc. - Toward a United America, and English-Only Movement. See, too, the accompanying graphic.)
Language: What It Is and Why It Must Be
"Language," as an English word, dates from the 14th century. Language is "the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community." Language is "a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meaning." [Source: Merriam-Webster Online]
Are all ideas and feelings the same? Arguably, no - they are a function of the cultures and societies in which they exist. Are words, their pronunciation, and methods of combining them identical across all languages? Of course not. Are conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, and marks expressed and understood universally through every language on the planet? Only by God.
Few of us have a lineage or ancestry which stops at the geographic borders of the United States of America - yet we all are, and must be, Americans. This means, and must continue to mean, our language is the language of America: English.
All Rights Reserved. Copyright Millennium Suites, LLC 2007
Published by Michael K. Miller
Human, male, Christian, American || Paladin, intrapreneur, entrepreneur || Writer || Father || Retrograde Subject Matter Expert (RSME) on Life, Living, and Love View profile
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2 Comments
Post a CommentMichael, I only wish that I knew you had written this before I fired off on my article - I would have referenced yours here as well. I have taken many PM messages from a woman who just joined AC who is angry about what I wrote. Thank you (and the others) for the encouragement. It is not easy to speak the truth and there will be people who fire off those flaming arrows at you when you do. Cheers, my friend.
Amen - I do not understand how people want to come here and make the U.S. cater to their language instead of using ours. It's ironic that a lot of Western & Eastern European countries require their people to learn English as a 2nd language, but not most of the Spanish-speaking countries whose people come here. Maybe learning Spanish isn't a bad idea for us but people should be REQUIRED to learn ENGLISH if they want to live here.