We're All Angles Now

I hear English is the official language of the US now. I propose that as long as we’re making things official and all, let’s have an official dialect. Naturally, I favor the south midlands dialect from my hometown, and I reckon that the “y’all” version is preferable to the “y’uns” version spoken to the east of Fort Mountain. All you dipthong deprived Midwesterners would have to give up your linguistic assault on your countrymen. And grating New York accents would be replaced by a mellifluous mountain twang. Instead of “fuhgeddaboudid”, they’ll be saying “I’ll tell you whut!”

And let’s put an end to neologisms once and for all. The official English language is English as it was spoken in my hometown on the effective date of the designation of an official language. If we don’t insist on this, it is possible that Spanish lexical inputs will infect the language such that we might as well have learned Spanish in the first place. We’ll need one of those committees like the French have to preserve the purity of the mother tongue.

Maybe this is not going far enough. Maybe we should purify the language of all the foreign borrowings that have sullied it since we brought it from the motherland. Let’s get rid of all those cowboy borrowings from the Mexicans, all those French and Indian words, and anything from the Philippines (boondocks is all I can think of at the moment). What the heck. Let’s take the language back to 1066 before the Normans polluted it with their sissified French frippery. Instead of asking for beef or pork, from now on I will be ordering a nice slab of cow or pig. I’m still not satisfied. Let’s go all the way to the language as spoken by the Angles before it became a pidgin for Saxons, Angles, and Danes. That’ll bring us together as a nation.