While I would agree that American English is a ridiculously overcomplicated , this step toward "dumbing" the country down to the level of the rest of the world is just going too far .
Two hundred years ago our language was far more simple than it is today , even the Founding Fathers took creative license with spelling , but our country was next to unimportant on the world scene . Today we have a language that is rated by linguists to be the most complex on earth, and the second hardest tongue to learn next to Chinese , and look at us now , we're pretty much the Rome of our time . American English supplanted French as the international language of business decades ago, all airline pilots must speak it , these both being indicators of our true importance in the world economy . But the forces of feel good think we should step back in time and go back to being stupid . Screw all the progress that our language has helped us to achieve , let's just encourage our students to be lazy and stupid , shall we ? [:@]
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Kevin Haendiges
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RE: America isn't dumb enough , let's take it down a notch
Ever notice how spelling has taken a back seat in school's curricula since the rise of word processor programs? Why get the to the root of the problem by studying when you can have a machine do the work for you? This proposed simplification seems to be the next step in this evolutionary process of lexical ignorance.
Perhaps more people should read (or re-read) Orwell's 1984 and its appendix onNewspeak before jumping onto the simplification bandwagon. Such sacrifice ofcolorful variety and etymologicalhistory of the English vocabulary will only make the use of our language asmeaningful as the least common denominator of speaker/writer.
America isn't dumb enough , let's take it down a notch
