From my “Partisan Dictionary” in the Southern Partisan about thirty years ago:

Englishman — n — A German trying to be a Frenchman

Germans call the German language today “Denglish.” It adopts more and more American words. I was talking to a guy in Moscow who was taking his PhD in German, and he was complaining about this to me, in German. Two minutes later he used the word “renten.” As you can see, “renten” comes from American, “to rent.” The proper German word is “mieten.”

I am a naturally forgiving person, so in less than an hour I stopped kidding him about this.

The Germanic English of 1066 has been replaced by our present Frenglish. Much of it is harmless, but most of it is truly destructive. You see, along with French we adopted the whole attitude that anything Germanic is lowah claaass. It is considered very upper claaahss to say “Merde!”, but the Germanic-derived word s*** requires all those stars.

But the hatred of Germanic has a much, much, greater cost. Medical students spend much of the time they should be learning about medicine in learning the tortuous route the English language took to avoid ANYTHING Germanic. So in order to describe parts of the human body, those parts must be translated into Latin, or, worse, Greek, and then spoken in a way I am dead certain no Roman or ancient Greek would have recognized. It is a wholly artificial language made up for the express purpose of being hard to learn and impossible for the average person to understand.

When non-German speakers look at German, it seems to consist of long, long words. We associate long words with incomprehensibility, since that is what they are used for in English.

As a matter of fact, I do know of a single long word in the German language, one that showed up a lot when I was translating brick-making stuff into English in the 1950s, “Temperaturwechselbeständigkeit.” Looks LONG, doesn’t it? But it is several short, easily comprehensible words put together to describe something:

Temperatur — I don’t think that needs translating

Wechsel – change

bestand – withstand

ichkeit — this is a standard ending which denotes that what went before is a description.

The word in English is “refractory.” But how in heaven’s name could a person tell, from “refractory,” which I assume is some tortured Latin word, what one is talking about?

Britain had absolute dominance in industry about 1820. Half the manufacturing on the planet earth took place on that one little island, totaling half the size of the Black Sea Valley. Germany, despite its ridiculous European economic policies, pulled up beside Britain by the dawn of the new century. America, of course, had outstripped them both hopelessly by then.

How did Germany do it? The British had industry, but looked down on it. The Uppah Claaahss “went to University” and learned Latin and Greek. The German upper class took technical courses, and laughed at a grown man wasting his life studying dead languages. The only reason the Frengish survived at all was America.

The Germans did not even bother to Latinize their technical language. If you were smarter than the peasants, you didn’t need to hide behind some cheating like that.

The big excuse for Frenglish and Latin and Greek is that they are supposed to be “universal.”

Wake up and smell the coffee! Eastern Europeans and the rest of the world are absolutely mystified by this obsession with French and dead languages. They speak ENGLISH as the universal language, and they are deeply pissoi-d off that they have to learn that pretentious crap when they are trying to do something serious.

It takes a long, long time for reality to catch up with crap, oops, sorry, le crapois, like that. The internet is moving us toward phonetics. Something else will have to come along to force us to say temperaturechangewithstanding instead of digging into graveyards to come up with les crappois like “refractory” or a whole medical vocabulary nobody needs.

You may note that I don’t correct spelling errors of commenters. That is because, in my opinion, the Internet is producing phonetic English. I do not remember the last time I had any difficulty understanding, even reading at full speed, what a commenter was talking about.

In England, the purpose of language is largely to tell you what claaaahss a person is. Among the colonials over here, spelling tells you whether a person is educated in terms of our established religion. Many and many a PC cannot think, but by God he can SPELL.

This impresses me the same way a lawyer in a black dress or a drunk in a costume impresses me. But I am not alone. I remember that ten or twelve years ago, there were regular complaints in the chatrooms and Newsgroups about someone’s spelling. Now I don’t see ANY of that.

We may be solving a problem the English-speaking world has had for centuries. And it is a problem people like me have all the time: I want to see how a word is spelled, but I can’t look it up because it is in alphabetical order and I can’t FIND it because I can’t SPELL it.

If you are Buckley and you get PAID for not thinking, all this and words no one else uses and untranslated French phrases are fun and impress the hell out of the illiterates in the press corps and on campus. But for those of us who specialize in THINKING words are just tools, and we do not want to read twelve pages of instructions before we put down what we are thinking.

Spelling, like English English, is a matter of claaahsss. You show you have gone to Cambridge or gotten a full dose of Mommy Professor here by repeating the spelling prescribed by some dictionary.

I consider myself an aristocrat, but the last reason for that is that I can lord it over comrades who don’t spend their lives over a friggin’ dictionary.

And PLEASE don’t make the comment you would have made if I had never been born. READ what I wrote. Somebody is going to say, “But that way lies CHAOS!!!!” I started off by saying I have not had a single problem understanding what a person was saying because of his spelling.

That way lies sanity, not chaos.