IF FORCED to pick my favourite part of the history of English, I’d be torn. There are so many to choose from. Would I pick the Great Vowel Shift, the mid-millennium change in pronunciation that largely explains English’s inconsistent spelling? Perhaps I’d turn to colonial times, when English vocabulary ballooned. I do like Noah Webster’s […]

STATES that have passed English-only laws aren’t typically the sort to shower money on bilingual education. Utah, which declared English its sole official language in 2000, seems to be an exception. The New York Times recently reported that the state is expanding its langauge-immersion programs for young students. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin are currently on the […]

“MAN is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” So wrote Rousseau (“L’homme est né libre, et est partout dans les fers.“) Did he mean that just half the world’s population, that half with a Y chromosome, was doomed to a life dans les fers? No, he meant everyone. But as a man of […]

Mastrionotti: Fink. That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?Barton: Yeah.Mastrionotti: Yeah, I didn’t think this dump was restricted. AT THE Lingua Franca blog, Ben Yagoda describes a conversation Ruth Fraklin of the New Republic over anti-Semitic code language in America before and during the second world war. “Restricted” is perhaps the baldest of all the terms (as used by […]

IF YOU asked twenty well-educated souls to identify a physiocrat, only a couple could help you out. Writers like A.R.J. Turgot, the Marquis de Condorcet and Francois Quesnay are not household names, unlike Adam Smith or David Ricardo. But they are important. According to one late-19th century historian, the physiocrats (who called themselves the “économistes”) created “the […]