My friend Alan Behr, an excellent writer and critic, writes: "English is the most powerful language on earth. Americans are born with a race car of a language and almost never pop it out of 1st gear - and they ignore or resent like hell anyone who does."
Journalism is partly to blame. Writing for newspapers, you were never supposed to use a word that readers would have to look up. Now the Internet, with its obsession with information, has further impoverished the language, even as it provides instant access to the meanings of unfamiliar words.
