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Random: English - The Forgotten Language
Posted December 7, 2006 9:08 AM
After we chewed up and spit out Michael Richards for his blatant and terrifying racist meltdown, we find ourselves wanting to delicately point out that we've noticed that English, the language of our country for the past several hundred years seems to be dwindling away as the melting pot of our country grows larger. Personally, I love interracial relationships and the possibility that if we are all diluted enough a few hundred years from now, racism will be impossible. I'm also half Russian Jew and half Armenian, a rare combination of two holocaust-surviving families, yet I still thought Borat was hilarious, so clearly I’m not supersensitive. That said, it appears that more and more instances are occurring – and perhaps it’s mostly a California thing – that nobody speaks English anymore. I had the cable guy come over here yesterday and I said, "I’d like the cable box to go over there, please." He looked at me as if I was absolutely insane. "I not understandy." He told me. I couldn’t be any clearer, "Put cable box there." Again I got that baffled look. This man spoke not a word of English. I was reminded of Sam Kinison at the 7-11. "Marlboro! Smokey smokey! You don’t speak English had you get the f’ng job?!" Come on, people, if you’re going to live here, at least try to learn some of the language. After I took an hour and some pencil markings to explain where to put the box, you should have seen his face when I asked him for a channel lineup card. I’ll I can tell you is that the look on his face was priceless. I’ve never seen so many lines on a forehead before. "A gwat?!" he asked irritated. I never knew there was a ‘y’ at the end of understand and a ‘g’ before the word ‘what.’ For this hard-working gentleman and many others like him, we’d like to recommend a fabulous book that would be a great guy gift for the non-English speaking man. We love that you’re here, now let’s all get on the same communication page, and it will be bliss.
