language

President Obama told a German audience today that the U.S. lags behind other countries because Americans don't speak enough foreign languages. It’s not the first time he’s expressed the sentiment: back in 2008, Obama said, “It's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup, right?"

Obama may be right that Americans should speak more foreign languages. (Of course, that leaves aside the propriety of lambasting the people you lead while representing them in a foreign country.) But it's a strange point for him, of all people, to make. After all, Obama has no demonstrated facility for (or, indeed, interest in) foreign languages. The self-proclaimed "citizen of the world" has conceded that he speaks no foreign languages. (Though, in his remarks today in which he upbraided Americans' lack of foreign languages, he did manage to choke out a mangled “guten abend”—that, for all of our American readers, means “good evening.”) 

A helpful suggestion: Instead of hitting the golf links so often, Obama may want to clear some weekend time for a little Rosetta Stone.

The fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published by Houghton Mifflin, was released last fall. In the typecast world of dictionary publishing, American Heritage is the “conservative” dictionary. Developed in the 1960s in the wake of company president James Parton’s failed attempt to wrest control of the G. and C. Merriam Co., which had recently become notorious for the publication of the “permissive” dictionary, Webster’s Third, the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary was deliberately marketed as the choice of squares and fogeys.

In Gambit, Rex Stout’s 1962 mystery novel, the quirky and housebound detective Nero Wolfe sits before a fireplace on a too-small chair, “tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged.” Why? “He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language.” Able to cite “a thousand examples of its crimes,” including using infer and imply interchangeably, the detective calls it “a deliberate attempt to murder” the language.