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English kicks derriere

I sat down to write a column about the student demonstrations in France. Cowardice was not the only motive. It is true that I hoped to gain a week's respite from grammatically-challenged hate mail in my inbox, but I also thought it was time for some comic relief. Alas, a column on French economic theory and practice cannot ripen for me at least until President Jacques Chirac makes an utterance. He promises to do so soon but with typical disregard for the exigencies of my column deadline. So I have to turn to another of his recent utterances, or rather speech acts.

A couple of weeks ago, President Chirac stormed out of an EU meeting when his compatriot Ernest-Antoine Seillière, head of the European Employers' Association, began to address the gathering in English, "the international languages of business," as he put it. According to one report, Chirac's mood was one of "high dudgeon," low dudgeon being rarely available in the shops these days. Whether Monsieur le Président also pounded his little fists and stamped his little feet I cannot say, but it was a newsworthy tantrum.

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As an effective means of checking the remorseless advance of English as a world language, the gesture ranks with King Cnut's whimsy that the flowing tide should ebb at his command. English enjoys a world prestige unprecedented in history yet sure to increase significantly in the future. The phenomenon is not without serious downsides, not the least of which is that it ministers to Americans' linguistic sloth and parochialism. But Gallic hissy fits can do nothing to change it or to rescue French from the status of a wearying also-ran on the international scene.

The ascendancy of English is a fact of geopolitics, but the genius of the language itself is not an irrelevant factor. English has been with regard to other languages what America has been with regard to other nations: a voracious importer of talent. Incidentally, the French influence on the English vocabulary is huge, far greater than the other way around, though since most of it was effected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we tend to forget it. Our borrowings continue to be frank and generous. It is marvelous that our borrowed term for a definitive defeat is "waterloo!" Our attitude has been use the word used by the people who do it best. Hence "gulag," "jihad" and "tournante" are replacing "concentration camp," "holy war" and "gang bang." Such documented and undocumented immigrants across our open linguistic frontier do the work that English words don't want to do. Speaking of not wanting to work, the Do-It-Best rule suggests that it can only be a matter of time before "grève" and "chômage" jostle with "strike" and "unemployment" in the pages of Webster's.

In the 12th and 17th cantos of his "Paradiso," written of course in Italian, Dante uses the word "Latin" (once as "latin," once as "latino," accommodating his rhymes) to mean, roughly, a serious discourse in serious language — that is, the most elevated form of language itself. That is a usage that reflects both the de facto sacral role of Latin in Dante's world and the poet's political mythology of the continuing dignity of Latium, the countryside around Rome, whose language Latin was — and, in Dante's view, is. Or think of the curious phrase "lingua franca" — meaning something like the linguistic common denominator. A pseudo-Latin phrase for a pseudo-French dialect, it dates from the period of the Crusades and the so-called Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and it usually just means effective, rudimentary vernacular discourse.

In like manner it is not impossible that the word "English" will in time come to mean not a particular language but language itself. It already means that in several pidgins. "What english can you speak?" For when a product is wildly successful, its name tends to break free from the moorings designed to restrain it. A "fridge" is any refrigerator, not merely one trademarked "Frigidaire." A "Kleenex" is a paper tissue of any manufacture. For millions in my generation in the southern latitudes, a "coke" is any soft drink despite all the best efforts of well-paid corporate lawyers in Atlanta to persuade me that it is "a registered trademark of the Coca-Cola Corporation." We soon may have to find a way of asking the question "Do you speak English??" that gives sound not merely to the interrogation point but to the little superscript "R" within a circle that means a registered trademark of the English-speaking peoples. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.

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