Quickly, now, without checking any dictionaries or usage guides: which of the following expressions is original, standard usage?

• Once and awhile
• Set and stone
• Try and get
• Spit and image
• All and all
• Hand and hand
• Tongue and cheek

I’ve run into all of these recently, mostly in student papers, but also in published work. So many of our habitual expressions have lost their connection to the original meaning that students—and sometimes professional writers—set them down as they sound without regard to whatever sense they might make. Given the aural similarity of and, in, and -ing, it’s no surprise that malapropisms like in this day in age crop up—for how often do we actually think about something being common in this day and also in this age, or era? And why would we?

If we think carefully or have background knowledge, of course, we can and do make some sense…

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“Never make predictions,” Casey Stengel warned, “especially about the future.” But we can’t help ourselves. Now linguistics professor David Crystal (was his last name a self-fulfilling prophecy?) is telling audiences like the one at the Hay Literary Festival that Google will be changing our spelling habits. This development, he predicts, will be all to the good for the English language—not because we will start spelling with as iwth, but because we will drop all those irritating, unnecessary silent letters cluttering our orthography.

Maybe, maybe not. I’m no prognosticator. What interested me about Professor Crystal’s forecast was not so much the observation that commonly misspelled words receive an autocorrect from Google’s search engine, but rather his first example of a spelling ripe for change: rhubarb. My partner is Canadian, and as we were on a long drive, I me…

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Banja Luka, Bosnia — Here in the administrative entity known as the Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled part of the country properly called Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina, abbreviated “BiH” locally), they wave the Serbian flag in preference to the national flag of the country they reluctantly belong to; and the people pretend that their national language is three different languages. The mystery of the three in one.

Here is what it says on every pack of cigarettes in BiH:

That’s once for the Bosniaks, once for the Croats, and once more for the Serbs. The Bosniaks and Croats use the roman alphabet, and Serbs often do as well, but hardliners like to use Cyrillic. What “Пyшeњe yбиja” says when you romanize it is “Pušenje ubija”—for the third time.

Smoking kills, Smoking kills, Smoking kills: They have said it thrice …

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I’ve just wasted a perfectly good morning scrolling through my own pronunciative history. Joshua Katz, a Ph.D. student in statistics at North Carolina State University, has produced a series of visualizations of the Cambridge linguist Bert Vaux’s online survey of English dialects, as applied to the continental United States. There are various pretty patterns of blue, red, green, yellow, and the blends in between, and you can check 122 maps showing regional differences in pronunciation, word choice, and syntax according to the questions posed by the survey.

Now, clicking on the maps—and trying to guess, ahead of time, at the four most popular answers to each question—is fun all by itself. I couldn’t guess, for instance, at No. 83, “what do you call an easy course?” but I was all over  No. 36, “how do you pronounce the c in grocery?” But more interesting, for me, was …

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Col. Sir Henry Yule, colonial lexicographer

As my recent posts have reflected, I’m still basking in the afterglow of the meeting last month of the Dictionary Society of North America, a gathering of about a hundred people who make dictionaries, study dictionaries, or just enjoy words.

Since that meeting, I’ve argued that “Unabridged” is an odd name for a dictionary. But that’s nothing compared with Hobson-Jobson.

That’s the name given to a dictionary whose sober subtitle, in one edition, is A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive.

It’s an old dictionary, first published in 1886, so it’s in the public domain. You can find the full text of the 1903 second edition in Google Books.

And it’s a ve…

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If you want to know how Americans speak, the go-to source is the quarterly journal American Speech, published by Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society.

It’s a scholarly journal, written by experts in the study of American English, but a surprising amount of what they write is accessible to anyone. A case in point in the most recent issue (Summer 2013) is the case of Louisville, Ky.

Louisville is on the edge of the South, both politically and linguistically. Linguistically, the South is set off from the rest of the United States notably by the “ah” pronunciation for the long i  that is an “ah-ee” sound in the North and West.

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. In the South, you hear the “ah” version of long i when it comes before a voiced consonant, as in wide, size, or five. You also hear an “ah” when i comes at the end of a word…

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Each year at around this time, the folks at Beloit College put out the “Mindset List,” a half-serious, half-facetious accounting of what incoming first-year students do and do not know. It is ostensibly designed for professors, but it’s always picked up by news media and Web sites, not only because it’s often funny and eye-opening, but because August is usually a very slow news month.

As I write, this year’s edition hasn’t come out, but to give you the flavor, here’s a little of last year’s:

For this generation of entering college students, born in 1994, Kurt Cobain, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Richard Nixon and John Wayne Gacy have always been dead.

• Robert De Niro is thought of as Greg Focker’s long-suffering father-in-law, not as Vito Corleone or Jimmy Conway.
• Bill Clinton is a senior statesman of whose presidency they have little knowledge.
• They have never seen an…

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I wrote recently from Bosnia and Herzegovina about the curious practice of taking a unitary language and trying to find ways of representing it as several different languages for political reasons, in order that each of several ethnic groups should be able to claim a tongue of its own. I wrote on the basis of my own experience in the country rather than delving into reference books about it. But after my return I checked the classic reference work on the languages of the world: the Ethnologue.

The Ethnologue is published as a book by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in numerous editions. The latest edition is the 16th, published in 2009 (see the Amazon.com entry for Ethnologue: Languages of the World). It incorporates the ISO 639-3 standard inventory of three-letter language identifiers (you are currently reading ENG, of course).

But the Ethnologue now also exists as a Web site…

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Darryl Myers offers a rich and interesting comment on my Lingua Franca post last Thursday, observing that German is a interesting case to look at. It is indeed.

Splitters (those who incline toward maximizing the number of different languages posited) might point out that some of what we treat as varieties of German are separate languages by the familiar test of mutual intelligibility. A German speaker from Bonn or Berlin will not understand Swiss German dialects like the speech of the Zurich area (sometimes known as “Züritüütsch”) without doing a lot of work. Züritüütsch” differs not just lexically and phonologically but syntactically as well: There is a subordinate-clause construction with a dramatically different word order that has been theoretically important (for references see Chapter 16 of my The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). So in principle German could be counted as…

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Sometimes you wonder if that whole language thing might not have been the best idea. I’m referring not to when people say “Best. [Blank.] Ever.” or misuse literally, but to when they use words to dissemble, bully, obfuscate, self-aggrandize, proudly display their ignorance, or and/or snarf up airtime like an imperial power having its way with a virgin land. Other times, though, you really understand the whole concept. One of those occasions, for me, came last week, when I heard excerpts of the telephone conversation between Antoinette Tuff, a bookkeeper in a DeKalb, Ga., elementary school, and a DeKalb police dispatcher. Tuff called the police because a man walked into the school carrying an AK-47 and (the police later determined) 500 rounds of ammunition. A tape of the conversation, which lasted 24 minutes, is available on YouTube, and I highly recommend you listen to it.

Tuff…

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Today’s quiz: What’s the difference between a bag and a sack?

(Spoiler alert: Before you read further, what’s your answer to that question?)

All right, you have your answer? It’s not hard, after all.

I put the question to three dozen first-year students at a small Midwestern college. Here’s what some of them said:

—Bags have straps, sacks have handles.

—A bag has handles and is usually bigger.

—A sack can be plastic or paper, while a bag is cloth.

—A bag is brown paper and a sack is plastic.

—Sacks are made of brown paper.

—Sacks are more disposable.

—Bags are better looking than sacks.

—A sack is used to carry groceries; a bag you can carry around your shoulders.

—A bag you carry on your shoulder, a sack you throw over your shoulder.

—Bag is something young people say. Sack is what older people say.

—You carry…

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This is not click bait! Miley Cyrus actually is relevant to this post!

Everybody seems to be writing open letters to Miley Cyrus, especially, it seems, pop musicians who aren’t nearly as successful as she is. The latest example is a one-time indie personage named Sufjan Stevens, who put this on his blog:

Dear Miley. I can’t stop listening to #GetItRight (great song, great message, great body), but maybe you need a quick grammar lesson. One particular line causes concern: “I been laying in this bed all night long.” Miley, technically speaking, you’ve been LYING, not LAYING, an irregular verb form that should only be used when there’s an object, i.e. “I been laying my tired booty on this bed all night long.” Whatever. I’m not the best lyricist, but you know what I mean. #Get It Right The Next Time. …

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New Yorkers have been on line since before there was online—for nearly a century, at least.

They are so prominently on line, in fact, that those of us in the hinterland know it’s a way to identify New Yorkers by the way they talk. Not by their pronunciation, but by their words. If instead of waiting in line or standing in line, you wait or stand on line, you must be from New York—the city, that is, and neighboring New Jersey.

That fact is confirmed by the recent Dictionary of American Regional English. The entry for on line in Volume 3 identifies New York City and northern New Jersey as the area where people say they’re waiting or standing on line.

The earliest evidence in that dictionary is from 1958, but on line wasn’t new even then. Google Ngrams provides published examples of New York on line going back as far as the 1920s. For example, here’s an ad in a 1927…

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A long time ago in a university far, far away (which I will not name), the English Literature department added to its undergraduate handbook a page of grammar and usage advice. That page, still reprinted every year, contains a well-known list of “common errors” stated as self-violating maxims (with droll intent). I will not repeat all of these tongue-in-cheek ukases, but here are a dozen samples:

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Louisville skyline, Wikimedia Commons

So how do you say the name of the biggest city in Kentucky, home of the Derby and Urban Bourbon?

The spelling is easy enough. All agree on Louis-ville, that is, the city of Louis XVI of France. The settlement at the falls of the Ohio was given that name in 1780, shortly after its founding, in gratitude for the Bourbon king’s support of the American revolution.

(As it happens, the town fared better than Louis did. When the French Revolution came, the monarch whose consort purportedly said “let them eat cake” could have used a drink bearing his family name at the Urban Bourbon Trail, to be established in his Kentucky town two centuries later.)

But the pronunciation is another matter. Too many possibilities. How can a visitor know what’s right?

To be sure, all agree that the “s” of Louis should be pronounced the French way, that is, not at all. Even in the backwoods of America, evidently, this rule of French pronunciation was well enough known.

And over the years, natives of Louisville generally settled on a pronunciation that sounds like “Lou-uh-vull,” or two-syllable “Luh-vull.” Say it otherwise, and you were likely to be marked as a stranger.

But a funny thing happened in recent times. Nowadays, according to people in Louisville who ought to know, anything goes. Or at least five things. In Louisville, you can get mugs, refrigerator magnets, keychains, and shot glasses that read:

Looavul

Luhvul

Looeyville

Loueville

Looaville

Louisville Gear, the company that sells these souvenirs, says “Looavul” is “the prevailing vocalization.” But they add,

“It’s all just a bit of fun and we invite you to be a part of it. Are we Frenchified? Hardly. Do we drag out our words with a Southern drawl? Not really. Some of us even pronounce Louisville as Looey-ville when we’re out of town! We are a bit unpredictable.”

What’s remarkable about this is not the variety of pronunciations but the celebration of them. It’s more evidence that we live in linguistically permissive times.

Photograph courtesy of Kevin Alves
(http://www.kevinalves.me/merk/)

I’ve come across the expression on street corners, near pizzerias, outside grocery stores, always as a prohibition. The location is invariably in Latino neighborhoods. Needless to say, the expression isn’t registered in either the OED or in the DLE (Diccionario de la Lengua Española de la Real Academia), which doesn’t surprise me. Lexicons have been slow in incorporating Spanglishisms, even one as versatile as this one.

Elsewhere I’ve seen the word in action: as verb (hangiar), as noun (hangiador), and as adjective (hangiante). On rare occasions, I’ve come across slight spelling variations: No Hangueo and, even less frequently, No Jangueo.

It comes from “hanging out,” a popular expression among American youth. Merriam-Webster defines “hangout” as a favorite place for spending time and “hang out” as the act of protruding. My 21-year-old son Josh, a senior at a New York university, often invites me, via email, “to hang out together,” meaning to spend valuable time with each other next time I’m in Manhattan.

In contrast, hangiar is confrontational almost to the point of xenophobia: It is a Latino art par excellence, i.e., the incapacity to take control, the desire to exist in a dissipated state. Since the No Hangeo signs are placed where 13- to 25-year-old Latinos will see them, the message is clear: “you young Spanglish-speaking ne’er-do-gooders, get out of sight.”

You might ask: Why not state the same expression in English: No Hanging Out? After all, it might have a somewhat different connotation, although it appears to make the same point. It doesn’t, though because No Hangeo acknowledges that both the announcer and his target have a common Latino background. As such, the message in Spanglish proclaims: I too could be hangiando like you, but I’ve chosen to focus my attention. So wake up, bro’; ese—despiértate!

Conversely, why not write the expression in Spanish? Because there is no simple way of saying “hanging out” en español. Andar por allí is a more itinerant turn of phrase: It is used to refer to someone not in a stationary state but wandering around. Pasar el rato is used for wasting time, though it doesn’t have a negative connotation. Other jargon expressions—and there are plenty, depending on the country—quemándola (burning it), zumbando como mosca muerta (buzzing like a dead fly), and, succinctly, no haciendo nada (doing nothing) don’t appear to be suitable for official urban signs.

Not long ago, a friend of mine who is a high-school teacher in Holyoke, Mass., while toying with the word, told me he is thinking of placing an ad outside his office: “Sí hangiar.” He feels strongly about it. “Students today have been turned into reward seekers. But Ilan, if there is order in chaos then there is concentration in dissipation. In the classroom and outside, we should not penalize them for taking it easy. Instead, when learning we should make them feel as if they are just having a good time. So they think they are fooling you, but in fact you’re fooling them. After all, isn’t Hispanic culture about knowing how to saborear el momento?”

I like the idea of turning the expression on its head. I’m reminded of a beautiful line by Borges: “yo vivo, yo me dejo vivir.” I live, I let myself live.

Ilan Stavans is substituting for Ben Yagoda, who is taking a leave of absence to write a book.

The teaching profession in Britain, where I currently reside, has very largely heard the sociolinguistic music: The facts of linguistic diversity and language change are generally accepted, teachers acknowledge most of the elementary facts about language, and dialect differences are not viewed in the same light as hideously disfiguring skin diseases. I had begun to think there was little danger of the British teaching profession being disrupted by an outburst of race or class bias masquerading as dialect purism comparable to the awful Oakland “Ebonics” brouhaha of 1996 (see my “Language That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Nature 386, 27 March 1997, 321-322).

But recently the Colley Lane Primary School in Halesowen, in the West Midlands, sapped some of my confidence with a campaign to humiliate its own students by denigrating their native mode of speech. The school issued a list of 10 phrases that are to be banned from school premises, banned simply because teachers think they represent features of the local dialect.

The dialect in question is that of the Black Country, a region of the West Midlands to the north and west of Birmingham. You’ll be relieved to learn that “Black” here has nothing to do with race. The area was for a long time a center of coal mining and industrial activity, and the associated griminess gave rise to the sobriquet.

Here is the list of putative local dialect features that the Colley Lane teachers have banned from their elementary school:

1. “They was” instead of “they were.”
2. “I cor do that” instead of “I can’t do that.”
3. “Ya” instead of “you.”
4. “Gonna” instead of “going to.”
5. “Woz” instead of “was.”
6. “I day” instead of “I didn’t.”
7. “I ain’t” instead of “I haven’t.”
8. “Somefink” instead of “something.”
9. “It wor me” instead of “it wasn’t me.”
10. “Ay?” instead of “pardon?”

The ignorance of English dialects displayed here is shocking. The majority of the list covers features that are not local to the Black Country at all.

Was for were in the paradigm of be occurs in many nonstandard dialects of English, in America as well as Britain, and ain’t occurs in all of them.

The reduced-stress form of you that novelists write as ya (International Phonetic Alphabet [jə]) is not even nonstandard, only informal: In a sentence like You can’t refuse a request like that, even if you want to, virtually nobody pronounces the occurrences of you as [ju:].

Gonna ([ɡənə]), as a verb of near-future temporal aspect, is likewise found in most varieties of Standard English: Very few speakers say [ɡoʊiŋ] in the sentence that is formally written I’m going to do it.

“Woz” seems to be just a pointless deliberate misspelling of a normal British pronounciation of was ([wɒz]).

“Somefink” for something is a nonstandard pronunciation, but is just as familiar from other dialects such as Cockney as from the Black Country: Labiodentals like [f] are substituted for interdentals like [θ], and voiceless stops are inserted adjacent to nasals.

And finally, “ay” seems to be just the usual request for repetition or confirmation that is spelled “eh” in representations of Canadian English and pronounced [ei].

So nearly all of the items on the list are simply familiar features of nonstandard dialects spoken around the world, some of them present also in informal Standard English (the way the teachers doubtless speak it).

What we are left with is the trivial matter of three pronunciations of negated auxiliary verbs: In the Black Country, apparently, we find cor for can’t, wor for wasn’t, and day for didn’t.

So what’s the appropriate reaction to such small but clearly nonstandard local dialect features? Should they be banned on school premises?

Linguists have been here before. It was established in the 1960s, through painstaking applied sociolinguistic research in Scandinavia as well as the United States, that there is a clear outcome difference between two strategies relating to local dialect speech: (A) strictly banning the local dialect and insisting on the prestige standard in class from the outset, and (B) accepting and welcoming local dialect speech at first and then gradually transitioning students toward the standard language over a year or two. The bottom line is that B was found to work better than A. Children improve more, in all subjects, under policy B. (Notice, I’m not advocating that we should pretend nonstandard features are standard; I’m talking about what empirical research shows is the most successful way of inculcating the standard.)

Fifty years later, the Colley Lane Primary School in the English Midlands shows us that educated people are often pretty clueless about dialects of their native language, and that it takes a little while for academic research on educational matters to have any real effect. In fact, when it comes to language, the time taken for research to change classroom culture and practices might be better measured in decades or centuries than in years.

Not long ago, the Real Academia Española, its matrix located in Madrid, with 21 branches throughout the Spanish-speaking world, did something at once surprising and disappointing: It approved the inclusion of the word espanglish in its official dictionary. I say it was surprising because for decades the RAE systematically disregarded the existence of this hybrid form of communication, suggesting it was just a passing phenomenon unworthy of serious academic consideration. Indeed, one of the institution’s recent directors, Victor García de la Concha (1998-2010), regularly declared Spanglish  “nonexistent,” as if by ignoring it the jazzy parlance of tens of millions of Latinos in the United States, as well as of scores of people anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world, would magically disappear.

But the inclusion of the word in the lexicon was disappointing because the definition the RAE proposed was misconstrued, naturally angering users on both sides of the Atlantic. In Spanish, the definition of espanglish reads: “Modalidad del habla de algunos grupos hispanos de los Estados Unidos, en la que se mezclan, deformándolos, elementos léxicos y gramaticales del español y del inglés.” I quote it in the original for readers to enjoy its hollow eloquence. In English translation: “Modality of speech used among of some Hispanic groups in the United States, in which lexical and grammatical elements of Spanish and English are mixed, becoming deformed.”

Deformed? Quite frankly, the RAE doesn’t appear to be de este mundo, “of this world,” or at least of our day and age. No respected scholar today would dare use such an ideologically charged adjective. To think of linguistic contact as deforming the concept of code is to engage in politics, not in scientific analysis. Of course, everyone knows that the one constant in any living language is change: to be up to date, to be au courant, a language needs to interact with its environment. That interaction entails loans and borrowings. In English, prairie comes from the French, rancho from the Spanish, mafia from the Italian, chutzpah from Yiddish. Is the English language polluted because it incorporates these terms? Hasn’t the base of modern English been defined by its imperial quests? Spanglish isn’t a concoction devised to aggravate highfalutin dons. It is a dialect, with specific morphological rules, that comes about from necessity. It is also, in my view, an expression of the emergence of a new mestizo civilization, part Anglo and part Hispanic.

According to historians of the Spanish language, the first American word ever to travel back to the Iberian Peninsula after 1492, when Columbus stumbled upon the so-called New World, is canoa, “canoe.” In 1496, it replaced the word barco in a grammar published by the Salamanca philologist Antonio de Nebrija, who is credited for describing el español as “la compañera del imperio,” the companion of empire. The inclusion of espanglish in the RAE dictionary may not be the first time this mixed tongue makes it in (estrés, “stress,” might have that honor) but is certainly a moment of historical proportions.

To some of us involved with the gorgeously polluted way of communicating of college students, Spanglish is an affirmation, not a negation. Unfortunately, it will take a bit longer for the RAE legislators to understand that what they consider verbal deformation is really creative rejuvenation, and that their definition of espanglish is as much a step forward as it is a step back: a hurra to a language used freely by Latinos and a statement of intellectual narrow-mindedness.

A half century of field work and lexicography came to completion earlier this year with publication of the last volume of that massive work, the Dictionary of American Regional English. It encompasses six volumes of a thousand pages each, some 50,000 entries of American regional words, numerous maps and countless cross references, along with a final volume including an index by region and the complete list of responses to a nationwide survey of regional vocabulary.

Move over, Oxford English Dictionary! You may have half a million words, but they don’t include the likes of

—trollock (trash) from eastern Maine;

—transparent pudding (made with eggs, butter, and sugar) from Kentucky;

—trumpery room (storage room) from Virginia and vicinity.

DARE is awesome to behold, and heavy to hold, weighing more than 30 pounds and occupying 14 inches of foot-high shelf space. But now, as if by magic, like the OED it has vanished into thin air, or more properly the cloud. This monument of 20th-century lexicography has been transformed into a 21st-century online reference, as light and as handy as your nearest laptop or iPad.

See for yourself: DARE.

There you’ll find, first of all, the unique DARE map of the United States, recognizable but distorted to have one place for each of the thousand dots representing communities surveyed between 1965 and 1970 for their distinctive regional vocabulary. Click on any state and you’ll find a list of the regions it belongs to and the regions within it. And what’s more, a complete list of the entries in that region.

Take “Desert Southwest,” for example. We learn that it includes New Mexico and Arizona and a bit of southeast California. We learn that the dictionary has 19 entries for that region, most of them names of plants, but including also “antelope jackrabbit,” “Mormon tea,” and “mutual,” whatever those might be.

And that’s as far as the free information goes. To see the definitions, you need to have the six volumes on hand, or pay for an online subscription.

It’s a little expensive. For an individual, it’s $150 a year.

That’s a lot, but it’s only about half of the $295 the Oxford English Dictionary charges individuals for an annual subscription. And you can also ask your favorite library to sign up for a 30-day free trial of DARE before paying the institutional rate of $1,200 a year.

If you happen to have access to the paper volumes of DARE, and are frugal and enjoy weightlifting, you might think you’d do just as well to stay grounded and ignore the cloud. But you’d be wrong. There are things you can find instantly with the digital DARE that are impossible with the print version. So much to tell, in fact, that there isn’t room for it in today’s post. I’ll give some examples next week.

The question routinely becomes a subject of debate. Does English need an institution to safeguard it, or at least to regulate its health? Spanish has the Real Academia Española; French, L’Académie française; Arabic, the Academy of the Arabic Language; Mandarin Chinese, the National Languages Committee; Dutch, the Nederlandse Taalunie; German the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung; Hebrew, the Academy of the Hebrew Language; Irish, the Foras na Gaeilge; Italian, the Accademia della Crusca; and so on. So why doesn’t English have its equivalent?

There have been repeated attempts to create an Academy of English, first in England, then in the United States. Intellectuals in England like Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift passionately debated the issue, and politicians on this side of the Atlantic, such as John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, suggested its function ought to be “to collect, interchange, and diffuse literary intelligence; to promote the purity and uniformity of the English language; to invite a correspondence with distinguished scholars in other countries speaking this language in connection with ourselves; to cultivate throughout our extensive territory a friendly intercourse among those who feel an interest in the progress of American literature, and, as far as may depend on well meant endeavors, to aid the general course of learning in the United States.”

In an age such as ours in which immigrants get blamed for not “becoming” Americans as fast, and as consistently, as their predecessors did, the impression prevails that immigrants are the ones not speaking the language as much as howling it. In England, in Canada, in Australia, and other Anglophone habitats, a similar if less vociferous complaint is heard today: immigrants ought to be blamed for the the general decline of civilization and along with it—of course—the standard of our beloved language. Yet it is immigrants who in the end often uphold the language with more pride. For they came from the outside and thus need to prove their true worth. The effect is similar to the convert to a new religion, who through the conversion process  becomes a more knowledgeable, more devout believer than those who were born into the religion. Ironically, it is immigrants like Mary Antin, Vladimir Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frank McCourt, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Junot Diaz, to name only a few in the United States, who at once protect and expand the parameters of the language, making it more elastic, less constrained. A student of mine from Quito, Ecuador, often repeats to me that he prefers English, his adopted tongue, because “it chose me, Profe. So I must honor it.”

One might say that in the English-speaking world we have the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and other such lexicological organizations. Don’t they serve the same role? Not quite, for these entities aren’t in the business of decreeing a constitution that establishes the parameters of what is permissible and what isn’t. The OED, for example, doesn’t prescribe what words we use; instead, it describes the way those words change across time and space.

Do we need one, then? Linguistic academies are intimately linked to nationalist ideologies. The Academy of the Hebrew Language came about as the State of Israel consolidated its status as a free country. Centuries earlier, the L’Académie française was established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu. The Real Academia Española in Spain opened its doors in 1713 to compete with its neighbor, L’Académie française. It would be preposterous to suggest we are less nationalistic becomes we don’t have one. On the contrary, English is vitalized all the time because it is an imperial language: in reaching out, it absorbs influences from various environments. It is said that for every native English speaker today there are between three and four nonnatives. This equation signals the pressure felt by those who were born into speaking English. It also points to the buoyancy nurturing it everywhere on the globe.

My own response to the question is fugetaboutit. For better or worse, the English language is an expression of the democratic values we uphold. In other words, ours is a language of the people, by the people, for the people. The only ones capable of defending it are us. And, needless to say, we can also mess up with it. But that mess-up, in my opinion, is precisely what keeps it on its toes. When I immigrated to the United States, in the mid-eighties, bad in English was the antonym of good. Today bad and good are often synonyms. Is that bad? No, it’s good.