q. so what’s really bugging you today?

a. oh, so glad you asked. at the moment, it’s that dunkin’ dougnuts commercial* where all the zombie-looking people sing about how confusing it is to order espresso (digging, in particular, at starbuck’s admittedly inconsistent tall-grande-venti sizing system). the chorus goes, “is it french or is it italian? perhaps fratalian.” followed by a voiceover: “lattes from dunkin doughnuts. you order them in english, not fratalian.” is it possible that they actually missed the irony in that latte is not, in fact, an english word? i hate this kind of rah-rah-average-joe-ness that smacks of cultural xenophobia. we appropriate yummy foreign foods, but god forbid that we have to wrap our mouths around a unfamiliar word in order to do it. everywhere else in the world, educated people learn to speak two, three or more languages. what gives americans the perogative to bask in our own cultural ignorance? it’d be one thing if we were some little isolationist nation. but the US goes lumbering around the world imposing our own notions of right and wrong on other cultures right and left.

you know who else has been up to this same sort of cultural newspeak? Iran. we snickered last summer at the news blurb that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had required that more than 2000 foreign-appropriation words be replaced with modified farsi words. pizzas, for example, are now known as “elastic loaves” (washington post article