It's wonderful growing up speaking English. You have all those words (600,000 in the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) and all those people around the world who know at least a few of them.
But few Americans take advantage of this dual blessing: 75 percent of us have never had a passport, and our working vocabularies - thanks in part to our pusillanimous newspapers - are actually quite small.
Last night, in my English conversation class, there was mention in the lesson of a book titled "How To Be Your Own Boss." I asked the students what kind of book this was.
"An autohelp book," the woman from Argentina said.
"Close," I said, writing on the board "self-help." I told her that occasionally we use the prefix "auto" and then wrote on the board the word "autodidact." I mentioned that many Americans wouldn't know what it means, though the Argentinian and the Chilean (a housewife and a maintenance man) both knew immediately, as they use it in Spanish.
