Long Exposure of Freedom Tower and Downtown Miami. “Monolingual Anglos continue to hear people brazenly talking Spanish whenever they order that cortadita or media noche.” (Photo by Getty Images)
English only!
El idioma inglès solo.
Seulement l’anglais.
Herr Drumpf has now declared English the “official language” of these Dis-United States: “It’s the craziest thing,” he says, “They have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
I guess if English is good enough for the Bible, it’s damn sure good enough for the rest of us.
Florida’s already been there, done that: English has been our Official Language since 1988, when voters approved a constitutional amendment.
Seems monolingual Miami-Dade Anglos, innocently ordering a cortadita or a media noche, were traumatized by hearing Spanish spoken openly and shamelessly right in front of them.
Spanish was the first European language spoken in Florida — long before English reared its little Germanic head.
According to a 1994 law review article attempting to explain this bald xenophobia, Cubans — who had fled Castro’s repressive state — had “become a culturally, economically, and politically distinct presence.”
They refused to melt in the white folks’ pot.
“As the Cuban influence grew, non-Hispanic whites felt increasingly alienated from their Hispanic neighbors and threatened with the loss of the community they had known.”
Fun Fact 1: Florida was a dependent territory ruled from Cuba for 200 years.
Fun Fact 2: Spanish was the first European language spoken in Florida — long before English reared its little Germanic head.
Despite this silly amendment, 30% of Floridians still speak a language other than inglès at home.
Yet monolingual Anglos continue to hear people brazenly talking Spanish.
Apostrophes matter!
There may be an upside to the ignorant nationalism that gave rise to Trump’s (and Florida’s) English über alles mandates.
English is a great language: Maybe DeSantis and Trump will learn it; maybe the rest of America will, too!
I admit I have a vested interest: I’m an English professor and nothing would delight me more than seeing the country become passionate about our supposed “national language”
How about the subject-verb agreement thing?
Or the semicolons to separate independent clauses thing, and the difference between “they’re,” “there,” and “their;” and — God help us! — “its” (possessive) and “it’s” (contraction: “it is”)?
Think apostrophes don’t matter?
If a tiger presents you with a plate of pancakes, it’s “your dinner,” but if you are presented to a tiger, “you’re dinner.”
Given that Florida helped pioneer the Stop Talking Foreign movement, wouldn’t you think Florida’s governor would be a role model, encouraging us all to take English seriously?
Alas, his command of our official tongue recalls the tortuous discourse of former president George W. (“Is our children learning?”) Bush crossed with a dyspeptic Elmer Fudd.
DeSantis is fond of saying “I don’t got.”
“I don’t have” or “I haven’t got” is what those of us in the English business call “correct usage.”
Language crimes
DeSantis is also guilty of crimes against syntax such as: “Someone that wants to go into local government and become, like, a county manager, people that wanna work in a state agency — you know, what kind of a foundation are they having? And this is really what we’re providing here: the ability for them to really excel. And, if you go through a lot of this and you choose to do other stuff, this is still gonna be very helpful for what you’re gonna be doing.”
Attempting to explain changes in Florida’s African American History curriculum, he proclaimed he “got a lot of scholars together to do a lot of standards and a lot of different things.”
It’s a pity he can’t, like, do a lot of standards and different things and stuff and learn to talk good.
Note to Yale University: Y’all might want to take a hard look at your Freshman English courses. Something ain’t working.
Note to anyone who thinks “y’all” and “ain’t” ain’t proper words: “y’all” is a contraction of “you all” — a plural “you.”
It’s in the Oxford English Dictionary, so shut up.
As for “ain’t,” it’s a contraction of “am not” and/or “are not” and first appears in print in William Congreve’s 1695 play “Love for Love.”
Rehire the editors
I’m sorry to say journalists are also guilty of trashing the language of Shakespeare the way the bat-biting Black Sabbath front man Ozzy Osborne used to trash hotel rooms.
I expect civilians to mangle English every minute of every day, unable to apprehend that while “regardless” is a word, “irregardless” is not, or distinguish between “less” and “fewer.”
Best not to even freaking mention freaking “who” and “whom.”
Every day (not “everyday”), in every state in the union, some poor high school Language Arts teacher is washing her Xanax down with a quart of Jim Beam in despair.
But those who wield words for a living ought to get it together and stop torturing English in public.
I know corporate journalism has fired most of the editors, but come on, print reporters: “Hear” isn’t the same as “here.”
NPR is also an offender, often refusing to follow the very simple rule regarding indefinite articles. It’s not “a event,” it’s “an event.”
Heard that twice on “All Things Considered” last week.
Nearly wrecked the car.
You do not say, “There’s 23 blatant lies in Trump’s latest post on social media.”
“There are (or the less desirable “there’re) 23 blatant lies in Trump’s latest post on social media.”
And don’t get me started on the imprecise stock phrases, the lazy metaphors, and clichés choking even the best reporting: the “elephant in the room,” “bone-chilling cold,” “at a cross-roads,” “at the end of the day,” “war-torn,” “hand-wringing.”
You probably can’t hear me, but I’m screaming.
Orwell would weep
To be fair, and also precise, everyone sins against proper locution at one time or another.
But no one offends against decent discourse like our politicians.
George Orwell reminds us, “The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.”
I’m looking at you, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The representative from Georgia doesn’t just mess up a words, she’s been mounting a full-on scorched-earth campaign against coherence.
“Peachtree dish” (we think she meant “petrie dish); “gazpacho police,” and “Marshall Law” — which is likely the name of an attorney’s office, but not the same as “martial law.”
In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell says our use of English “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. … But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Speaking of corruption and slovenliness, Herr Drumpf doesn’t so much struggle with language as treat it the same way he treats women, science, the poor, people of color, and President Vlodymyr Zelenskyy: with violence and contempt.
It’s not merely “covfefe.” Or “hamberders.” Or “Marine core.” Or “infair.” Or “the boarder.”
It’s the whole incoherent, dumb, over-capitalized, under-punctuated orgy of illiteracy and insanity.
Gentle Reader, try parsing this rant, which, I’m guessing, concerned Joe Biden on the beach in Delaware:
“Somebody said he looks great in a bathing suit, right? And you know, when he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know sand is heavy, they figured three solid ounces per foot, but sand is a little heavy, and he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have, I won’t say names, because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was, like —Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Cary Grant.”
Aw, hell: maybe it’s a lost cause.
Assuming we haven’t blown up the planet by then, perhaps philologists a century from now will study the Trump Era as the beginning of a new, completely lawless, meaning-free, oxymoron-laced argot, spoken and written (in Sharpie) by prominent Florida Men such as Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
Call it Floridaphonics.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.