Down The Rabbit Hole: English, Creme de la Creme of All Languages

[Warph]

You know, alliteration is just one of the quirky little twists that one can use to augment the English language.  English, for my jingoistic dollar: Is still the creme de la creme of all languages.  But to listen to all the alarmist intellectual Henny-Penny doom-mongers going on and on these days about the imminent death of the English language, you'd think the English language was, like, ya know, totally dying, or something.  Whatever.

George Orwell warned that banalities in the English language reflect a corrupted culture. "Banalities" without the "B" is "analities."  That's funny..... very funny. 

English is not just the language of WonderLand, Britain, Australia, Canada, and certain small parts of Arizona.  It's also the language of business, diplomacy, and technology.

Now, when I say English, I'm talking about what we speak here in the States, without the funny accent you illegals spout.  Because I don't know what language working-class Brits are speaking lately over there in England, but it isn't like anything I've ever heard when I lived there for two years.  I netflix "Snatch" and watched it over the weekend and I felt more out of it than Al Gore at the Oscars.  Hmmmm... as I remember, Tipper looked Purrtie good though.... much too good for that fat freak old man of hers who goes around scaring the multitude about that crap on global warming.  Now that the far-left libby's have awarded him an Oscar and the NPP for a piece of frightening fiction with no fiction solutions, maybe he'll try to do something different, like rediscovering Tipper or maybe reinventing the Internet.  What a piece of work this guy is!  He lives in a 20 room mansion in Tennessee that takes 4 times the electricity that a normal home uses and this is after he went solar, three gas-guzzling vehicles in the driveway and uses private jets to fly from city to city selling global warming.  What a Frappa-hipocrite!

Getting back to the subject at hand, I have always had a deep and abiding love  :-*for the English language and my English Teacher, Miss Martin, from early on in life.  I've always loved her flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, her sturdy dependability of nouns and the capricious whimsy of her verbs, the strutting pageantry of her adjectives, and the flitting evanescence of all her adverbs, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policemen, her punctuation marks.  WoW.  You think I got my butt kicked much in high school? 

I have been told one can gauge the esteem in which we hold the English language simply by telling someone you majored in it.  Now, the first thing they do is mentally subtract thirty grand off what they think you make.  The second thing they do is ask you to bring them a menu and tell them the soup of the day.  And why not?  In school, English was the easiest subject to b.s. your way through in high school.  There are no Cliff Notes for Physics.  You can't bluff your way through a Calculus discussion just by watching "Calculus: The Movie."  But when it comes to essay questions, well, you can fake it like a hooker being paid by the moan.

I understand that English is a protean, evolving language that must constantly change in order to remain relevant.  But let's not go out of our way to appropriate words from what other cultures justify making something more expensive.  Hey, you can add all the Italian suffixes you want, you're not fooling anybody over there at Starbucks.  It's still just coffee. Now ring me the hell up, you Frappa-loser. 

And Starbuccos is not the only cultural borrower.  Doctors tend to lift most of their phrases from Greek, which is only fitting since every time I go to see one, he somehow feels the need to spend the afternoon spelunking around in my butt.  All I know is if Hippocrates had been born someplace other than Athens, they would have come up with an easier way to check my prostate than drilling me like they're George Bush and my butt is Alaska. 

I wouldn't be so worried about the fate of the English language if more of us could speak it properly.  Forget the WWE... if you want to see real wrestling, watch our president pronounce the word "unilateral."  Now, you have to admit that when Bush is speaking unscripted, the English language disintegrates like a sandwich in Al Gore's hands.  Even Bush looks like he's surprised at whats coming out of his mouth, kind of like Malkovich when he had that puppeteer inside his head. 

The English language is very much alive.  From where I'm standing, our mother tongue is kicking ass and taking names.  It's large and in charge, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of piss and vinegar and ready to open up a big ol can of whup-ass.  It's calling the shots, it's bouncing and behaving, it's all up in it, and it's all that and a bag of chips.... for the love of God, somebody please tell me what in the hell I'm talking about. 

Anyway, take that "F-word" for instance." Frappa.... ...." FRAPPA....  Ffffff...rrrappppp... a.  Gives you chills, don't it.  It's a real beauty, isn't it?  From its fricative genesis, blossoming into its ripe, rich middle until its cruelly truncated in its prime by a merciless, glottal stop... In all of its earthy, salty, illicit Anglo-Saxon glory, the "F-Word" is almost as satisfying to say as it is to do.... "I'm Frappa-faced;  I'm Frappa-zoning;  Frappa-....;  man, I've been frappa-ing all day long!

Now, some would say I contribute to the coarsening of the English language through my casual use of soft profanity here in WonderLand.  To those critics... and I have many... I would respond that my discourse merely exemplifies the vaunted precedent of valorizing the oral vernacular.  I would further add that language is a living tissue, which must occasionally suffer the rupture of subversion in order to convalesce with more structural stability.  So to those guardians of the linguistic gates who charge that I shoehorn the "F-word" in wherever I can, merely to further a rather tenuous career of fulltime retirement on the golf-course that's built entirely on a profane house of cards, well, why don't you  just go Frappa-ize yourselves at Starbucks with a 3000 calorie Caramel Caramel Macchiato Espresso Con Panna Mocha Valencia..... Warph 

[Jo McDonald]

Holie-Molie   I laughed my head off all the way through that.

[flo]

this is hilarious.  and get a what? at Starbucks??  bet you can't say that three times real fast