By Jingo
I’m sinfully avoiding stress for a few minutes to write this, but I’ve been here long enough I feel empowered to write a couple of things that have been stewing for quite some time in my mind.
Number A
Christian love actually is unique. Sure, it’s a universal language and it’s all you need, etc., but it is still unique. This of course is not visible in the ‘burbs, because Christian love is at least the dominant vision of the cultural norm.
A lot of Turks criticize Americans for not being truly devoted friends, for being guarded for far too long in a relationship. I would posit that people hold back because a true loving relationship for us is so intensely focused that entering and exiting casually, even amongst brewski buddies, is somewhat horrifying.
Number B
English is, quite frankly, the bomb. I couldn’t really fairly say that after just studying Spanish, but this new language is related to Russian, Arabic, Japanese, maybe some Farsi, maybe some Greek (I didn’t say that, though, if anyone asks, but the word for “port” is common between the two).
The turns of phrases, the playfulness, the puns, the inflections and betrayed intentions of stitching together and delivering an English sentence is so vigorously awesome that it’s really hard to describe.
The whole “in Eskimo there are 12,000 words for snow” thing, like most cross-cultural self flagellations pimped by our education system, really short changes English. We have five words for everything useful for us to split. We have copious slang, even imported from other languages like Yiddish and German and Computer Scientist.
It is versatile, easy to learn the basics, and nearly impossible to learn the sophisticated parts as a second language. We have little quirks like “who” and “whom” that separate the linguistic men from the boys. We speak almost entirely differently in formal situations versus casual ones. We do things in speech that cannot be written properly.
How many sounds can you get out of the letter “a”? Can you imagine writing in a phonetic English alphabet?