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Wednesday, May 31, 2006
But the little girl understands
Meet the new boss...
John Derbyshire, the Humbert Humbert of the Corner fears the Little Girl Overlords of the Aztlan:A nearby family has a sweet little girl aged 6 or 7, currently attending kindergarten or 1st grade (I'm not sure) in the local elementary school. She's taking all her lessons (except English) in Spanish. It's an option the school offers. Her parents are pleased: "She can already speak a lot of Spanish!"
No offense to anyone, but I think this is awful. I wouldn't mind if it were being done with some other language—-Latin, say, or Hungarian, or Sumerian, or Chinese. Since it's being done —- and ONLY being done —- in Spanish, it's hard to resist the conclusion that this is part of a deliberate program of Hispanicization on the part of our political and bureaucratic elites.
The logical end-point of this path will be the situation in Quebec, where a person not bilingual — in our case, in English and Spanish — will be at a disadvantage in the job market. Is this a thing Americans actually want? Did anyone ask us?
When stuff like this is seeping in even to drowsy middle-class outer suburbs like mine, bilingual America is well on its way. Our masters are sick or(sic) our boring, unimaginative monolingualism, and they mean to do something about it, whether we like it or not. While I imagine that the ability to speak Sumerian might come in handy...
Okay. Let me start over. Regardless of what the Derb says, learning to speak Sumerian would most likely be a waste of time, so let's move on and just say that his whole point is rather dumb, or as we like to say in SoCal: muy estúpido. The parents of the little girl, have chosen to let their little girl learn in Spanish (which is an excellent idea at an early age) and he presents no evidence who these "masters" are and how they have coerced this family into letting their precious little daughter be Hispanicized. Or Hispanicalized. Whatever.
There isn't a day that I wish that I hadn't just gone through the motions in high school Spanish and actually learned to speak it conversationally, outside of my ability to ask Sr. Rojo how his day is going. And in over thirty years I have yet to meet a Sr. Rojo. Sr. Rojas, yes. But it's just not the same. When the Derb says that someone who is not bilingual will soon be at a disadvantage in the job market; well welcome to the real world. I don't know too many people who don't already pay more for employees who speak multiple languages. I have a half-dozen employees who speak Spanish, as well as a few who speak Tagalog, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean, and their ability to speak more than just English made them more desirable to me as employees over other applicants.
One of my cousins who was touring Europe in the seventies told me a story about a German couple he met on a train in France who told him: "We say that a person who speaks three languages is 'trilingual' A person who speaks two languages is 'bilingual', and a person who speaks one language is called 'an American'."
One gets the impression that the Derb is one of those people who thinks that by speaking louder to someone who doesn't understand the language, they will finally understand him.
Pendejo.
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