Geraghty (and others) are up in arms over Obama's desire to broaden the linguistic capabilities of U.S. citizens. But Obama doesn't seem to realize that the rest of the world needs to learn English more than Americans need to learn, say, Russian.

Obama's apparently unfamiliar with things like the airline industry, which demands that all traffic control be done in English, modern telecommunications, and Al Gore's Internet. If you learn computer programming, you learn it in English. Computers in Costa Rica aren't programmed with "sí - despues" loops, they have "if - then" loops, and the "http" that precedes all web addresses stands for "HyperText Transfer Protocol", and that doesn't vary from country to country.

This is the way things have gone for thousands and thousands of years: The nations within the influence dominant culture had to adopt the lingua franca of the dominant culture. Greek was the dominant language before Latin, then came French, and now, thanks to the efforts of English colonization and American culture and technology, English is now the primary language of the world.

So don't worry if you're not fluent in Croatian or are puzzled by the diphthongs in Tagalog; English is nothing if not flexible. What began as a way for the Saxons to communicate with their Anglo and Jute neighbors is now a rich, complicated and ever-growing language that mercilessly vacuums up the idioms and vocabulary of the other languages it encounters. The King's English may not be as common as it once was, but English itself will go on for many, many generations to come.

And thanks to Memeorandum for the link!