You did indeed, Dan, but please don't get me on the subject of your early history. As with so many early histories (ours included), there are myths and half-truths and small historical acts that are blown out of proportion. There were spin doctors, then, too. I have been to Jamestown, and to Monticello and Mount Vernon, I have visited Congress, I've been round the White House, I have visited your Supreme Court. I have even been round Benjamin Franklin's house in London. Years ago, I spent a whole summer in New England.
As for the English Language, it is a mongrel beast but something quite wondrous in my view. The English language is a fusion of source langauges. It is eminently flexible. It absorbs, borrows, invents and steals with little regard for life's niceties. It is a higgledy-piggledy language. Within these relatively small islands, there is a myriad of dialects, different turns of phrase, local words that don't travel far (fewer of any of these than there one were) and I haven't even begun to consider regional accents and the effect those have on words, word usage and sentence construction. To quote Melvyn Bragg at the start of"The Adventure of English"The way in which a few tribal amd local germanic dialects spoken by a hundred and fifty thousand people grew into the English Language spoken and understood by about one and a half billion people has all the charateristics of a tremendous adventure". For us in Britain, American English, however pervasive through commerce, modern technology and the media, is but one branch of a language rooted in these isles.
And, anyway (as I wrote in the Millennium issue of a Dylan newsletter I once put out) who knows whether English will continue to be the predominant language amongst the peoples of the United States?
