To Picky (comment from Jan 29, '05)
I digress with this post, from the discussion on tsunamis, because you said something that is very true and always interesting to me. Now PLEASE, no one else take this up as an affront. Just try to read this and take it as is. Consider too that all nations and races have their "common traits".
Americans, with exceptions along the way, have a tendency to want to make sense of everything and fitting it into a 1, 2 pattern or else they change it to what makes sense to them. Many words in the English language have been assigned a different spelling just because someone didn't get the original spelling.
Etymology is the beauty of English. In much the same way this country is built on its history of immigrants and all of what they brought with them, all English isn't latin. It borrows and benefits from other languages. It's the context that primarily gives meaning to the word and therefore justifies what it is. If that makes sense to us, then we really don't need to do surgery on a language that is more beautiful for its ins and outs and its range of inclusion.
Recently, in a back-handed manner, the President declared English the official language of the US of A. This because someone clearly pointed out that you cannot decree that all immigrants learn and speak a language when your country doesn't list it in officialdom. Well, some of us are still laughing because - double whammy! - you don't speak English either. You speak and write something, which if we were to pick it apart for all the ways in which it has been set apart - just to be different - from English, it would be fair to coin another name for it that specifically denotes its Americanism.
Again, no offence meant here. This is just an objective, unbiased comment based on close observation over more than 20 years.