For a person such as myself who tries to follow what is happening in the Oval Office, the Trump Administration is very hard to keep up with. However, I can finally highlight an executive order that I think is at least a century or more overdue — the establishment of English as the official language of the United States of America. President Trump’s Executive Order on March 1st designated English as our country’s official language and rescinded a mandate by President Clinton that required agencies and recipients of federal funding to provide extensive language assistance to non-English speakers.

Of course, several people in our country speak other languages, especially Spanish. Still, it took this long to acknowledge such a practical truth — English IS our nation’s language! After the United States’ presence on almost every continent in World War II, it eventually became the world’s language as well. For every one person who uses English as their first language, there are four more who use it as a second language, making it the most widely spoken second language globally.
As the United States became a more powerful world power, so likewise did our language. Having personally traveled over half a million miles around the world in the past three or four decades, I have always found people who converse in English.

I was especially surprised when I first went to the USSR in 1988 and found young men who learned English words from British and American rock music. This phenomenon was so prevalent that the Hollywood film, “Red Hot,” directed by Paul Haggis and featuring Donald Sutherland and Balthazar Getty, was shot in Riga, Latvia, in 1992. (My oldest son got to be a set dress setter, and my wife was their on-site nurse). The plot told the story of teenagers in the USSR who had parties with smuggled American rock music, which they got from seamen on merchant ships. The story was set in 1959, and the takeaway from it was that even then, Hollywood and pop culture in the USA had a global reach, including the Iron Curtain.

But I also found that virtually everywhere in the world, English has also been used for business and trade, financial markets, education, and scientific research; the list goes on and on. I found this to be true many times. I was sharing a compartment with a Finnish salesman when I was on a train from Helsinki, Finland to St. Petersburg, Russia. We were both reading books, and he noticed mine was in English. He asked in Finnish if I was an American, and though I knew very little of that language, I could tell because he was pointing to the book. I nodded my head while saying “kylla” (‘cool-la’ meaning “yes”) in Finnish. He then shifted to my language, using a very broken accent and vocabulary, “You should drop to your knees every night and thank God that your first language was English.”

That salesman recognized that virtually everywhere if a person were somewhat high on the leadership pole or had aspirations to get there, they would need to communicate in English at least to some degree. Throughout the world, the internationally agreed-upon language for pilots and air traffic controllers in aviation is English. Even the “linga franca” of French, which was the dominant language of diplomacy, surrendered to the English language shortly after World War II.

But, I think another very big reason English is so prevalent worldwide is because it is relatively easy to learn. It starts with having a Latin alphabet, which is much easier to read than Russian Cyrillic or Chinese Mandarin alphabets and has relatively simple grammar. On the other hand, English is easy to learn initially, but it takes a lifetime to perfect. For example, words like “there,” “their,” and “they’re” sound the same but meaning is entirely difficult. How did the word “few” come to mean a small number, but “quite a few” means many? Ever wonder why we “dust the furniture” when we are actually ‘undusting’ it? Or “weeding the garden,” which sounds like we are putting weeds into the garden?

But, hey, forget all that. Now that English is finally our national language, we can say it loud and say it strong, “English is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”