Isn’t it funny how language gives itself away sometimes? Linguistic history. The way we speak and write is shaped by thousands of years of events and ideas. English is absolutely no exception. It’s built from a dozen languages. Germans, Saxons, Scots, Frisians, Norse, Frenchmen, Latin scholars. All who cemented themselves through culturally and literally conquering the land of Great Britain over and over again.

And then it’s spread and evolved further, “Manifest Destiny” we called it. How bold we were. We even changed “I” to be capital not long before the English language’s siege of the world. Distinguishing ourselves as Gods, as higher than them than it. A pedestal ingrained into the lives of the billions of children who have learned it, secretly shaping them to what we thought was the “perfect way”.

How much was lost in this senseless conquest? How many lives destroyed? How many fragments of cultures trampled over? It’s a Library of Alexandria of culture. This was not some cataclysmic event that you’d have been taught in school however. Alexandria did not burn. It was picked apart by centuries of exiling intellectuals long before Caesar had anything to do with it. It was destroyed, rebuilt, and then slowly decayed until the only ones to care are today’s scholars desperate for the unappreciated knowledge it once held.

We do not see what we have until it is gone and our own greed blinds us to our own destruction. That is the English way.

/June 20th, 2023