Why is English So Retarded?

Anyone who receives a decent volume of correspondence from the American public will be convinced of one of two things. One is that the American public is retarded. The other is that the English language is retarded. A small subset may conclude that both are true, which is a mean but highly defensible position.

Unless you live on the campus of a major American university, or are rich enough to never have to shop at Wal-Mart, it is a dangerous proposition to believe the bulk of humanity inherently stupid, because the only way off that cruise ship to hell is a Winchester round in the mouth. It is a far better thing to point your stupid-blaming finger elsewhere, and in the case of mainstream America's inability to compose a coherent sentence or spell "comeuppance," the ripest target for pointing is indeed our very stupid language.

As anyone learning English for the first time can attest, it is clearly a language designed by a wretched and miserable people. Spelling holds no bearing on pronunciation, each letter makes several different sounds without rhyme or reason, and there are no accent markings whatsoever. The letters "X" and "C" are completely redundant. Words that are spelled entirely differently (won, one) are pronounced the same, yet have different meanings. Other words are spelled virtually the same but pronounced in wildly different ways (tough, though, thought). And we wonder why people moving to our country can never seem to master the language or make a decent Burrito Supreme.

Why is this, when people the world over who have vastly inferior weapons-making technology to ours still have languages that work fine? How did we manage to screw the pooch so completely in this most basic of tasks? The answer is the English language's roots as a bastard tongue that was never intended to be taken seriously in the first place.

English originated in 600 AD when some guys who were stoned were fucking around, making up words, and it soon spread as a way for little girls to alienate their parents while they were having sleepover parties. In short, it was the Pig Latin of its day. Over the years, more people in the lower classes began to use the language, since it was seen as a cool and antiestablishment way to communicate, more "street" than the stuffy proper languages of Europe. For hundreds of years there was no proper spelling of any word in English, writers spelled everything any damned way they pleased, but eventually the fad grew too big and the squares found out about it.

One giant square, Richard "Big Dork" Mulcaster of London, took it upon himself to devise a standardized spelling of English words. The socially maladjusted Mulcaster sought to prove his intellectual superiority by arranging the spelling of words not phonetically, but rather by extrapolating their historical origins. This was precisely the kind of thing that got him his ass kicked daily back in school, and for good reason.

Mulcaster, a back-of-the-closet homosexual, was terrified of homophones (words pronounced the same), and this greatly influenced his spelling scheme. Thanks to Mulcaster, virtually any combination of letters in English can be pronounced any way the writer likes, to avoid the possibility of spelling two different words the same way and being exposed as gay.

Between 1066 and 1400, England was ruled by the Normans, an insane clan of men who all had the same first name. They demanded that everyone speak Norman French, the same half-assed dialect American tourists speak when visiting Europe. By the time Henry IV reclaimed England for the English in 1399, the only people who remembered the English language at all were hilariously senile, and their vague remembrances became the foundation for modern English. But even then the language was not done being molested: In the 1400's the printing press was invented, and printing presses were run only by foreign immigrants who didn't know constant exposure to lead-based inks gives you cancer. Since printers were paid by the line, they frequently padded out words with extra letters to make their layouts more visually pleasing and profitable. In time, these skylarkings became standard English spellings of words since nobody cared and it was raining all the time anyhow.

This hideous amalgam of modern spelling had become standardized by 1700, with the first dictionary appearing in 1755. Between 1750 and 1850 both Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster attempted to make some sense of the English language, but in the end only succeeded in adding more words, including the noun "noat" for a midget-sized ark and the verb "franklin'" for being blown off a toilet in the middle of the night by a bolt of lightning.

Shorthand inventor Sir Isaac Pitman, drawn to spelling reform by the nonsensical spelling of his first name, developed the Phonotype alphabet in 1842, which succeeded in inspiring all manner of freaks to come out of the woodwork and develop their own alphabets. When the writer George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, one condition of his will was that a new English alphabet be developed in his name, which led to the creation of the Shaw-script, a hilarious new alphabet that looks exactly like a Word document accidentally converted into Wingdings.

Subsequent attempts at "fixing" the English alphabet have been dismal failures, since even simple spelling reform makes words look goofy, and anyone who's spent twenty years learning to spell English sort-of correctly isn't about to chuck all that just to make things easier on little kids and immigrants. And so, th status kwo of th Inglish layngwaj lumbrs forwrd unchaynjd, az it haz sins 1755.

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