Bear Your Bare Arms and Read until It’s All Been Read

Posted by Beth Dylan on Jul 11, 2008 in Aggravation, Blog, Contemplation | 2 comments

America is, like, the greatest place ever. We’ve got the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom of this and that, we can have guns, we can bash this political figure and praise this celebrity… We can do a lot here. I think that’s probably the reason why so many people come from their native countries to find a home in the United States. They want to live the “American Dream”. It doesn’t really matter where you came from, or why you left, or what your culture is, or what language you speak. In America, we strive to be the best, most accommodating homogenization chamber that ever existed. The most that we ask of you is that you pretty please speak English.

Since most of us in the United States of America speak English, it’s only fair that the majority rules and everybody should speak the same language. Never mind that it’s only easy for us to tell others to do it because we’ve been speaking it since our youth. We’re trying to unite the country under one flag and one tongue (until Spanish eventually punches us in our boca and tells us to callate).

But let’s think about this for a minute. Is it really so fair to ask everyone else to learn this ass-backwards, inconsistent, and irregular language? Anybody that really takes time to consider how English works can see how confusing it must be for a non-native speaker to keep up. Hell, I’ve been speaking English since my beginning and I still get hung up here and there.

Some Examples:

Drink, drank, drunk: Drink is a verb in the present, drank is a verb in past tense, and drunk is a state of being. Example: I saw her drink. I watched as she drank. She became drunk.

Hang, hung, hanged: To hang is to dangle, to be hung is to be well endowed, and to be hanged is to be killed via dangling from one’s neck. Example: They wanted to see him hang. He was well-hung. He was hanged for it.

Freeze and squeeze are spelled similarly, but share little in the way of similarities during conjugation. Water can freeze. Water freezes. Water becomes frozen. You can squeeze an orange. She squeezes the orange. The orange has been squeezed.

We have homonyms and homophones, too. For example, you might want to read a book that a friend read. Or you could write about the right way to skin a cat. Or you could be bare-chested and hunt bears because you have a constitutional right to bear arms and your bare arms. Things could get messy pretty quickly.

Or if you want to give directions to someone and they ask something like “So I turn left here?” and you say “Right.”

“So I turn right?”

“No, you were correct. Turn left.”

I tentatively agree with people when they get all flustered and argue that people who live in America should speak English, but I also think we shouldn’t be so high and mighty and force immigrants to anglicize their names just so we can pronounce them.

I’d rather speak Spanish anyway.