Post 9 of 30: The English Language

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination; it is the property of the language itself."

- Poet Derek Walcott

This quotation came to me from The Writer's Almanac, found here on the web. I think it's right on, too.

Having travelled just a bit - both throughout the United States and Europe (England, Denmark, Germany, The Czech republic) - I find it remarkable that people outside the U. S. speak much better, generally, than we do. The most striking difference is in their vocabulary. We here in the U. S. tend to use simpler words. We just don't use a large number of words.

The Monty Python group made a joke of their sole American-born member for what he said on a flight from England to the U. S. - to California, I believe. Terry Gilliam looked down, saw a lake and said something like, "Look at that great big bunch of water!"

And that's what we do - we use many simple words ("great big bunch of water") to describe something for which there is a perfectly acceptable alternate word. An alternate word about which, many times, we don't have a clue! (In this case, "lake" would have sufficed, of course.)

But back to the language . . . flexibility is its hallmark. How many times have new words been created (sometimes in jest, I think) only to be adopted by the masses in short order? Think "gynormous". Same with phrases. Remember Clara Peller's "Where's the beef?"

As a comparison, consider this: there are about one million words in use in the English language, compared with 100,000 for French.

I suspect that as the use of English expands to all portions of the globe the number of words will increase. After all, English does tend to pull into usage words from many differente languages. All it takes is a popular song or a line in a movie or a news story to introduce a new word to the rest of the English-speaking world.