IN THE KINGDOM OF THE KING'S LANGUAGE

I do not think that anie language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, either with moore pith, or greater planesse, than our English tung is, if the English utterer be as skillful in the matter, which he is to utter: as the foren utterer is.
-Richard Mulcaster
The First Part of the Elementarie

English, n. A language so haughty and reserved that few writers succeed in getting on terms of familiarity with it.
- Ambroce Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary


Idiocy, like gravity, pulls in any venue, and in this kingdom the effect is twice as magnetic. Imagine this cocktails scenario, between two English speakers, one average, the other above it:

Average English Speaker: What's up with you now?
Above-average English Speaker: I'm writing a book.
AES: Cool. What's it about?
AAES: It's an autobiography.
AES: Cool. So, who's it about?
AAES: Uhhh! me...duh.
AES: Cool. So when's it coming out in print?
AAES: I'll have it published posthumously.
AES: Cool. I wish to read it very soon.

The scenario is scary because it's real. In this era of the culturally disengaging textspeak, great Englishspeak is hard to come by even in a place where English is the primary language. The statistics not only inform, they also boggle: According to Richard Lederer in The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinary Literate, of the 616,500 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary the average English speaker possesses only about 10,000-20,000 in his vocabulary. I can add to the stat without being strictly empirical: Of the 20,000 as stock knowledge the AES has only a faint awareness of a good number. (I am the only subject of my study so I'll be the example. I know the word syzygy, from my Spelling Bee days, one of the few 6 letter-words or more that do not have a vowel. But I don't know what it means. I'm an idiot, with a capital I. Thus, from where I sit gravity pulls twice as much. Cool.)
------------

In the above scenario, the words 'autobiography' and 'posthumously' do not form part of the AES's vocabulary. Don't be surprised, I've known worse. Where I work, somebody who speaks only English argued there's no such word as 'withdrawal'. Withdrawal: as in, There is a massive withdrawal of words from his word inventory; or, He stopped reading a long time ago he is now suffering from knowledge- withdrawal symptom.

Back to Lederer, who seems to be overwhelmed by the fact that the English language is the most 'democratic language in history'. Democractic? In what sense? In the sense that it is way ahead of its nearest pursuers? German with 185,000 words? Russian with 130,000? French with 100,000? To respond, we may need to go back to Lederer's English and raise more issues: What is democratic, the freedom to appropriate other culture's language? (as in: Whoever said that English is the language of invasion?) Inasmuch as theft of words is not a punishable offense, we could possibly argue that English is way ahead of the language game because it knows how to appropriate.

Consider -

alchemy: from Arabic alkimia, or the art of transmitting base metals into gold;
luxury, from French luxuria, or excess;
gaze, from Swedish gasa, or to stare;
dispatch, from Spanish despachar, or expedite;
boondocks, from Tagalog bundok,or mountain; or
orchid, from Greek orchis, or testicle (because the tuberous roots of the orchid supposedly resemble testicles)...

Lederer again: the guy insists that you can one up your enemy with impunity by enriching your English vocabulary. He teaches you to attack the average English speaker, in lieu of the usual 'You rotten pig' which he may understand, with the following weapons, as 'You...

'venal pettifogger
'vituperative virago
'perfidious mountenbank
'renthentious blatherilite, or,
'splenentio termagant'

There is a moral to Lederer's. As he states in his book, here's an anecdote attributed to WL Phelps of Yale U about a student who wrote, by way of answer in his examination booklet, the following idiocy:

The girl tumbled down the stairs and lay prostitute at the bottom.

In response to which, the professor wrote in brilliance:

My dear sir, you must learn to distinguish between a fallen woman and one who has merrilly slipped.

English is cool, even if imperialist. Why? Do you know the word onomatopoeia? When a word sounds exactly what it is? Like,when I tell you: You are so boorish, you should know I meant you in the negative, boorish being so negative-sounding, dour and punitive. And when I say your heart is golden, you should know I meant your heart in the best of terms even if your English is insipid, golden being what it sounds, a gem, gleaming.

And here's the catch, again, by the percipient Lederer: the word 'quisling' is onomatopoeic. Even if it means bad while it sounds good, the meaning conciding with the sound. Quisling means a traitor, and thus the sound of the word hides its meaning, the sound being traitorious.

In the meantime, I'll coin these words with their meanings, in the hope that Oxford will take notice:

Jobertian: referring to somebody who is resourceful;
ArianneianAngelian: as one who cannot finish reading The Remains of the Day; or feels lazy to call her 2nd dad;
Belleian: poetic;
Ghostian: censorial;
Jetian: somebody whose stomach is je;
cbsian: somebody cool; an AES; or one who needs to go to the bathroom and will say...

...I have to check on the status of my orchids!

(Postscript: Hi, M! why are you such a snob?)