Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

President Reagan brought us to the ultimate: America As Total Television. During his governance the printed word simply ceased to matter. White House dynamos h…

Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first…

In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not …

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

P.S. Perl's master plan (or what passes for one) is to take over the world like English did. Er, *as* English did...

Proverb - a definition: The wisdom of many and the wit of one.