If you can read this

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Last night I saw a variant of the following bumper sticker on a car driving around my neighborhood (click image to enlarge; original found here):

The variant I saw had white lettering on a blue background — that is, no flag — and the wording of the second part was "if you're reading it in English, thank a soldier". (Other variations ask that you thank a veteran, the military, a U.S. soldier, …) Both wordings are a little off, if you think about it: if you can read the text of the bumper sticker, then of course you can read it in English (and of course you're reading it in English). But that's not the point of this post, especially given that I've also found a more sensibly-worded variant here ("If you can read this, thank a teacher… and since it is in English, thank a soldier.")

No, the point of this post is to pose an honest question, for which I leave the comments open: what is this slogan supposed to mean? When has the U.S. military ever been involved in protecting the English language from the apparent onslaught of non-English languages? I found a couple of blog posts from 2006 (here and here) struggling with the same question, but I don't see much there in the form of (satisfying) answers. Nor do I have any suggestions of my own, hence the open comments. At this point, I don't see it as anything more than a random conflation of two views mostly associated with U.S. conservativism: English-only and appreciation for (the actions of) the military. (Which, incidentally, was how the sticker caught my eye in the first place: it was on a car with a "Vote No on Prop 8" sticker, and "Equality For All" sticker, and one or two other stickers expressing views mostly associated with U.S. liberalism.)



74 Comments

  1. Stentor said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:08 am

    I think the confusion comes from assuming that the soldiers in question are defending the U.S. from being de-Englishified by foreign invaders. But if it weren't for U.S. soldiers, those of us in the Southwest would still all be speaking Spanish. And other areas would be mostly speaking Lakota, or Cherokee, etc. (Although really, we should also be thanking the British soldiers as well, without whom we would have been taken over by the French, or possibly remained speaking Mohawk, Pequot, etc.) Then again, I doubt such wars of conquest are what the sticker-maker had in mind. They were probably imagining that without U.S. GIs, World War II would have ended up with us partitioned between Germany and Japan, and that al-Qaida would have us memorizing Qu'ran verses in Arabic by now if we hadn't invaded Iraq.

  2. josephdietrich said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:12 am

    Agreed with Stentor's comment, although he left Russian out of the mix.

  3. Lazar said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:13 am

    I think it alludes to those silly observations along the lines of, "If we hadn't won WW2, we'd all be speaking German now." Just imagine – if we hadn't won the Revolutionary War, we'd all be speaking English now!

  4. jfruh said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:14 am

    I think it's a domestic version on the theme common to foreign insults: "If it weren't for America, you [Brits/Frenchies/etc.] would be speaking [German/Russian]!" The idea being that if not for our military, so too would we.

  5. Jonathan Badger said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:14 am

    Hey, Philip K. Dick was pretty left-wing by most accounts, and yet a Japan-Germany partition of a defeated US was the conceit behind "The Man in the High Castle"…

  6. Christopher Stone said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:22 am

    The best suggestion that I can come up with is that the English language, especially for conservatives, has become an intrinsic part of the "true" American identity. From a conservative perspective, immigrants, especially illegal ones, certainly aren't "true" Americans; they weren't born and raised here, after all. Immigrants are also the population least likely to speak English, whether they are legal or not, naturalized citizen or not. Clearly speaking English doesn't make you an American, but I think for a lot of people, you're also not an American unless you speak English.

    Under this logic, there is clearly only one situation where a majority of Americans would not be speaking English: foreign rule. Clearly, if the United States were conquered from the outside, the first order of business would be to destroy vestiges of an American national identity. And part of that destruction would be a prohibition on English (I guess). Because the military protects America from foreign rule, it also protects us from having to speak languages other than English! Or, at the very least, it keeps us from missing out on learning English natively.

    I suppose though that you don't really even need that much of a logical connection to guess why it's on the bumper sticker. All you really need to know is a few simple equations:
    True America = English-speaking (plus other things, possibly including fireworks and baseball, but discluding tea, maple leaves, and dingos)
    Military = Protects True America
    Therefore, Military = Protects English

  7. Vance Maverick said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:24 am

    Stentor's suggestion of the second World War is a good one. I too had thought about the conquest of North America; yet while it's true that my fair western city wouldn't have been Anglophone without that conquest, it's a little strange to suggest that I, personally, would have been speaking Ohlone without it. My ancestors were mainly English and Anglo-American; if the West hadn't been won, they wouldn't have moved into it, and I'd be typing these lines in Cleveland instead, or York.

  8. linda seebach said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:24 am

    Surely I'm not the only self-taught reader irritated by the self-congratulatory teachers' bumper sticker.

  9. Dave Bath said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 3:31 am

    … and if you can see no Union Jack in the backdrop, thank the French.

  10. Rob Groves said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 3:43 am

    In addition to what others have already said, I think it's important to note that there is in implied hierarchy here. Just as reading is inherently better than not reading, reading English is inherently better than reading the language of our potential military/linguistic oppressors. We should thank the military for protecting us from the horror of speaking German or Japanese or Cherokee or Arabic.

    Probably implicit in all of this is some sort of (possibly misconstrued) Whorfian idea that if we spoke, say, German, we'd have different values, whatever makes America great would be lost with English.

  11. Karl Voelker said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 4:14 am

    Although I find the bumper sticker offensive, I don't think the wording is necessarily "off". I would interpret "you can read this in English" to mean "I am allowed to print this in English (thus enabling you to read it in English) because America hasn't been conquered", not "you are able to read English text".

    It's a bit of an unexpected turn, because the meaning of "can read" changes from one sentence to the next.

  12. Martin Griffies said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 4:25 am

    It's worthy of note that there is a clear imputation that English would have been displaced as the major language of America is it were not for the military. It's only in the new world that invasion or colonisation has resulted in the loss of major languages. Native American languages have mostly been replaced by English, Spanish and Portuguese, Australasian tongues by English.

    However in the Old World, colonial languages have remained as the demotic. North Africa still speaks Arabic with French as an overlay, India and Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Malaysia etc retain their ancient languages but with English as the shared international or trading language. In East Africa, both English and Swahili are used for non-local communication as well as the retained local languages.

  13. Lukas said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 5:34 am

    I don't think there is an implied superiority of English here… People just don't like to have a foreign, let alone an occupying power's language forced on them.

  14. Steve said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 6:01 am

    We still speak English over here, too, despite the Normans' invasion and subsequent 'Year Zero'-style cultural revolution.

  15. Joe said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 7:21 am

    Steve – The English at the time of the Norman invasion is hradly what you would classicly describe as 'English'. Even the term Old English is a tenuous one, for it is effect a different language. True, you can see English words and stylings within it, but you can say that for most world languages – the legacy of linguistical borrowing

  16. peter said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 7:44 am

    Martin Griffies says: "It's only in the new world that invasion or colonisation has resulted in the loss of major languages.

    So, Irish Gaelic and Welsh are not major languages?

  17. bulbul said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 7:52 am

    First time I saw this was a year or two ago in a response – a critical one – by a liberal blogger. I didn't make much of that slogan, but as a pinko commie dirty fucking hippie gay abortionist moonbat myself, I was very much surprised by that liberal blogger's, um, Englishnumberoneism as displayed by the following comment:

    Ever tried to buy a French copy of Roget's Thesaurus? Or Dutch, Portuguese, Lap? You can't, because those vocabularies are tiny. They're closed.

    I tried to wrap my head around this (surely a fellow member of the reality-based community should know better…), but after a while, I cynically concluded that Englishnumberoneism is not a conservative thing, but rather an American thing. Perhaps same can be said of the combination of Englishonlyism and worship of the military.
    OK, I'm pretty sure I'm wrong. Right? Right?

  18. JonW said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 8:29 am

    An equivalent I have seen runs “If you’re able to read, thank a teacher: if you’re lucky enough to be able to read English, thank the British Empire”, something which (despite the perhaps misplaced value judgement on the merits of English) is probably more true for most parts of the English speaking world than the slogan this blog is about. Not that this justifies imperialism in any way.

    Of course this is all a rehash of the tired old canard that if it wasn’t for the Americans the French and/or British would be speaking German. Mind you, it has been said (often in response) that if it wasn’t for the French, Americans would be speaking English.

  19. Jonathan said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 8:45 am

    The idea that other languages wouldn't have a thesaurus is kind of sillly. Usually they are called dictionaries of synonyms, and obviously they are not "Roget's Thesaurus" because you wouldn't make a dictionary of synonyms by translating Roget into French!

  20. Nick Lamb said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 8:57 am

    I don't think Americans in "The Man in the High Castle" speak German or Japanese. I could be wrong, but I think they speak English, at least among themselves. But I agree it's the "Lose WW2 => German replaces English" type of idea that is behind these bumper stickers when there's any coherent thought behind them at all. The same rhetoric (but not the bumper stickers) is somewhat common among older people in Britain, where a German invasion was a very real danger. If Germany had invaded, it would presumably have installed a puppet government, using people sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Such a government would of course speak English and so would the British people. But nobody was in a hurry to explain that when xenophobia was just another force that could be harnessed for the war effort. Perhaps, to put a silver lining on a very dark cloud, a German occuped Britain would have been multi-lingual, with most children speaking two (German and English) or more languages by the end of primary education.

  21. Richard said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 8:59 am

    I'd have to agree with Christopher Stone's analysis. American patriotism is founded on the most basic, vague ideas of a nation.

    What makes me want to comment is that I've been in Thailand for the last few months. This is like many international tourist locations where English is taught in all schools from Kindergarten up, but virtually none of the millions of tourists learn Thai beyond "Hello", "Thank you", "Police!", etc. Signs, menus, forms are always available in English. I can't help but think how to finish that sticker if it were sold here. "If you can read this in English, thank your rich countrymen who can't be bothered to pick up a phrasebook but who like beaches and Pat Thai."

  22. Amused Canuck said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:02 am

    If you can read this, thank a teacher.
    If you can read this in English, thank you for assimilating?

  23. David said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:04 am

    The bumper sticker of course seems ridiculous now, it reflects cold war fears. But one of my favorite plays is a satire of Russification by Vaclav Havel, The Memorandum. Much more engaging than a bumper sticker.

  24. Chris said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:08 am

    The really silly thing about the "Lose WWII, speak German/Japanese" idea is that the Germans and the Japanese DID lose WWII… and are still speaking German and Japanese, respectively. Even the Soviet Union occupying East Germany didn't try to force everyone to speak Russian – East Germany did all its business in German.

    This is not to say that languages have never been spread by military action – Latin comes to mind – but it's certainly not inevitable, especially for wars not followed by long-term conquest and colonization (which most modern wars aren't).

  25. Faldone said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:10 am

    Perhaps the suggestion is to thank those noble soldiers of the Anglo-Saxon-Jute Confederacy who boldly replaced what would have been a native British Romance language.

    And, last I checked, Arabic is not the original native language of North Africa.

    But, wait! The native British Romance language would also have been a conqueror-generated language.

    Oh, my! What's a purist to do?

  26. Nick Lamb said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:12 am

    No peter, Welsh isn't a major language. Even when there were actually monolingual Welsh speakers I doubt they can have numbered more than a million or so. It's tied to a small geographic area, and its current resurgence is related to the exact same nationalist / supremacist BS that this bumper sticker is really about.

  27. RoaldFalcon said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:13 am

    “Reading in English” is used metonymically to mean “enjoying all the benifits of the cultural continuity of the United States of America.”

    The opposite—reading in some other language—would indicate a takeover by a foreign power and loss of cultural continuity. All such defeats by the USA have been heretofore thwarted by the soldiers et al. in the US military.

    The author may in fact believe in the superiority of the English language, but that is clearly not the intended reading of the slogan.

  28. Arnold Zwicky said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:21 am

    To bulbul and Jonathan, on the absence of a French (etc.) Roget's thesaurus: discussed a while back on Language Log, in connection with such a claim from authors who really should have known better.

  29. Ed said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:21 am

    I always took it to be celebrating the exceptional English teaching abilities of the members of the US military. All my English teachers were Marines and look where it got me!

  30. Jens Fiederer said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:31 am

    I'm surprised anybody would find these confusing, or even offensive.
    Anybody that grew up in an Eastern bloc country, where they had to learn Russian – instead of the good German that their forefathers were often forced to learn – would find this obvious.

    A Czech friend used to tease me with the greater number of declensions in her language (7) over mine (apparently German has only 4, although I left Germany before we ever studied such things). So I did a bit of research and found that in Finnish they used something like 15.

    So there, girl! She responded "I think I shall never learn Finnish, even if they conquer the world!" She was NOT some right-wing militant, but she, too, associated language with conquest.

  31. bulbul said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:41 am

    Arnold,
    I must have missed that post, thanks!

    Jens,
    I'm not sure I understand your point. I grew up in an Eastern bloc country and had to learn Russian (though my grade was the last that had to) and I don't see anything obvious about the slogan.

  32. Skullturf Q. Beavispants said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:49 am

    A digression from the main point of the post, but I wanted to say in response to Linda Seebach at 2:24 a.m. that you are not alone. I too have found the shorter bumper sticker, consisting only of the first line about thanking a teacher, to be a little annoying since it ignores all the kids who learned to read at home before going to school.

  33. Derek said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 9:57 am

    Are those of you 'confused' by this actually confused and unable to grasp the meaning, or do you simply disagree with its sentiment? I'm genuinely curious since it seems a very simple statement. It may be wrong, but it's clear to me.

    Stated differently: since it's standard English, the confusion must not be on a syntactic level. Is it on a semantic level, or something higher?

  34. David said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 10:12 am

    @Derek
    I imagine it's the dissonance generated by the idea that an individual's right to freedom of expression has something to do with the threat of violence. It's an unpleasant thought, easy to dismiss as paranoid jingoism in the US.

  35. bulbul said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 10:21 am

    Derek,
    to quote the author of the original post: "When has the U.S. military ever been involved in protecting the English language from the apparent onslaught of non-English languages?"

    David,
    no, this has nothing to do with freedom of expression. We're talking about the medium, not content. I'm sure you would agree that you can express yourself freely in any language.

  36. Oskar said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 10:36 am

    Being European, I read it too as a reference to the "If it wasn't for America, you lot would all be speaking German right now!" type of insults, which, lets face it, isn't too hard to imagine a gruff Texan saying to a Frenchman who's unimpressed with American culture. Well, maybe not the "you lot" part, but the rest of it.

    It's a common joke around these parts that the proper response should go something like this:

    "If it wasn't for America, you lot would all be speaking German!"
    "Well, if it wasn't for Europe, you lot would all be speaking Navajo!"

    Personally, I find both jokes somewhat distasteful.

  37. Jonathan Badger said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 10:38 am

    The really silly thing about the "Lose WWII, speak German/Japanese" idea is that the Germans and the Japanese DID lose WWII… and are still speaking German and Japanese, respectively. Even the Soviet Union occupying East Germany didn't try to force everyone to speak Russian – East Germany did all its business in German.

    Not really. While German of course remained the language of everyday use, it would be unthinkable for any ambitious East German *not* to know the language of the "Soviet brothers" at a proficient level, and joining German-Soviet Friendship clubs looked really good on resumes. East German Party leaders like Honecker were Russophiles fluent in Russian and who had studied in Moscow.

  38. Bill Walderman said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 10:42 am

    Having spent nearly three years in the US Army, where the plural of "you" was typically "youse mens," I'm not at all sure what language the term "English" refers to in the bumper sticker.

  39. David said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 10:44 am

    bulbul,
    That's really just being pedantic, but if you want to be pedantic, you could look beyond the US military to the history of the British military in the colonies for precedents in enforcement of the use of English. Naturally, the United States doesn't have an official language, but if it did, we could just as well be speaking German anyway.

  40. peter said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 10:58 am

    Nick Lamb: Welsh certainly WAS a major language to those people who spoke it, and who were forced through invasion and colonization to speak English. My question to Martin Griffies was to point out the factual error in assuming that language loss caused by invasion and colonisation only occurred in the New World.

    It is strange how often people need reminding that the English foreign policy of invasion, conquest and colonization began right there at home – in Cornwall, Wales, Lanchashire, Yorkshire and Ireland!

  41. Panu said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 11:05 am

    No peter, Welsh isn't a major language. Even when there were actually monolingual Welsh speakers I doubt they can have numbered more than a million or so.

    What about Irishthen? In the beginning of the 19th century, there were millions of Irish-speakers in Ireland.

  42. Rachel said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 11:14 am

    I've heard this from my grandmother (who is politically conservative – and who grew up on a Mohawk reservation where a lot of people spoke Mohawk). My brother was saying that he thought nuclear weapons were bad, and she said they were necessary because "How would you like to be speaking Japanese or Russian right now?"

  43. marie-lucie said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 11:25 am

    "if …, we'd all be speaking German"

    It seems that if the US had not entered the first World War, more Americans would be speaking German now, as German was considered a language of high culture in the US before that. Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography (I forget the name of it) describes how the descendants of German immigrants, who until then had proudly kept up their identity, spoken German among themselves and raised their children to speak German, were forced by social pressure to abandon their language once it was perceived as that of the enemy.

  44. Coby Lubliner said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 11:28 am

    All the references to Mohawk, Cherokee, Irish and Welsh are irrelevant to the topic, which has to do with written, not spoken language. As a rule, military conquest of non-adjacent territories that already had established written languages has not brought about an imposition of the conqueror's language, even (pace Martin Griffies) in the New World (witness the non-anglicization of Puerto Rico). The Arab conquest of Egypt seems to be an exception, perhaps because Coptic was too closely associated with Christianity.

  45. William Ockham said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 12:07 pm

    The key to this bumper sticker is that it is a dialog. The two statements were put together by people offended by the bumper stickers with just the first statement. Not offended because they taught themselves to read, but because they can't conceive of any public good being credited to anything but U.S. military might. This isn't about WWII, this is for people who think Red Dawn was an important political statement and that we are in danger of being conquered by Islamic terrorists.

  46. jesse said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 1:13 pm

    is there a language that is superior to others?

    i didn't realize that people are judged by the language they speak.

  47. RoaldFalcon said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:04 pm

    I was not finished!!!!

  48. RoaldFalcon said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 2:05 pm

    I am having trouble with the comment system right now.
    Sorry.

  49. Ken Brown said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 3:11 pm

    Perhaps the soldier you are being asked to thank is General Wolfe? After all, if it wasn't for him you might all be speaking French.

    Well, him & about ten thousand other men, mostly Germans and Native Americans of course, and the perhaps more importantly the entire Royal Navy.

  50. vanya said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 3:32 pm

    As a native born USA-er who has spent plenty of time with conservative right-wingers I find this thread pretty funny. Basically Stone and then Ockham at 12:07 nailed the code, and if you try to read the bumper sticker literally you'll never get it. It's an appeal to a xenophobic mindset that sees anyone/thing not American as threatening and believes our military is the only thing preventing the US from drowning in a tide of Hispanic immigrants and Arab terrorists. The people who created this bumper sticker are so ignorant of the greater world that they don't even realize how little sense the slogans make, if taken literally (i.e. can I thank a Russian soldier for the fact that I speak English since the Russians played a fairly major role in WWII? Or a Turkish soldier for helping keep the Commies at bay in Korea? I'm guessing the answer is not supposed to be yes).

  51. Andrew said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 3:32 pm

    There seem to be two things at work here. On the one hand, if our countries had been conquered by a foreign power, it is possible that we would all be speaking German/Russian/Arabic/whatever, in the sense that we would be required to learn those languages and use them as a means of international communciation. However, the sticker goes beyond this and suggests that we would not be speaking English. This is much less plausible.

  52. Martin Griffies said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 3:37 pm

    Peter-
    Since I've heard Welsh spoken in the street and in pubs within the year, I somehow doubt that it's been lost in the last twelve months.

    As for
    "It is strange how often people need reminding that the English foreign policy of invasion, conquest and colonization began right there at home – in Cornwall, Wales, Lanchashire (sic) , Yorkshire and Ireland!"
    I would say that all these were part of a process of assimilation rather than a foreign policy; after all, most of these places were only separate when England was ruled by Normans who also controlled large swathes of what is now France. Think of this as a process of unification rather than colonisation, in the way that Italy was unified in the 19th C.

  53. David said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 5:21 pm

    Martin,
    My understanding of the English conquest of the British Isles involves about 700 years of brutal wars during which the languages spoken by the conquered peoples were completely inconsequential to the conquerors (aside from being a handy way to pick out who to murder in a crowd). The issue of a common English and a common culture probably didn't become politically relevant until the Elizabethan era.

    I suppose my point is one of agreement, with the caveat that modern English itself didn't come into being until well after Cornwall, Wales, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Ireland (and Scotland) had already long been conquered. The eventual unification seems to me to have been a byproduct of political factors and new technology. I'm only a dabbler in this area, however, and I'm way off topic. If my facts are off (and it's germane to the original discussion) I'm sure someone will set me straight.

  54. David said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 5:33 pm

    …so I suppose another way of looking at it is that you can (ironically) thank a soldier for your ability to read that bumper sticker in English.

  55. dr pepper said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 5:52 pm

    If it weren't for the US military, the amish would be speaking german.

  56. marie-lucie said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 8:06 pm

    In European wars before the growth of nationalism in the 19th century, the goal of individual states and their rulers was to gain control of as much land and resources as possible and keep others from doing the same to them. Most borders were not fixed (unless geography fixed them) and treaties from those times mention what cities will belong to this or that nation, not what to do with the countryside in between. What language(s) local populations spoke was irrelevant. All this changed with nationalism and also with the rise in popular education and in citizen participation in governance: minority languages or dialects became obstacles to the smooth running of the new type of state and the integration of all its citizens in the national fabric.

    As far as England was concerned, the earlier push for English may have been a reaction to the still influential (though no longer actual) cultural supremacy of French, which had held sway for three or four centuries. The English were also conscious of being isolated by their language, which few in Europe bothered to learn, so pride in the language was also part of the reaction. In the US, it is silly to think that the nation as a whole could ever be made to switch to another language, unless a catastrophe of cosmic proportions occurred, but it was not so long ago that there was competition for English, especially from the cultural role of German as mentioned before. Add to this the fact that for people in some areas, who may for generations have heard nothing but English, the thought of being made to speak a different way may be horrifying because of its very strangeness.

  57. John Brewer said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 8:23 pm

    Since Prof. Bakovic teaches at UC-San Diego, I assume the high incidence in his neighborhood of the ability to read English-language bumper stickers is a result of the U.S. military's success against the Mexican military in 1846-48. But of course the causal chain that had previously brought Spanish to San Diego involved military force along the way, and the languages spoken in that area before the Spanish-speakers (and their guns) arrived did not at the time exist in written form.

  58. _method said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 11:04 pm

    Well I could certainly be wrong but, at the inception of the United States of America was it not considered that the vernacular was to be German as opposed to English as to break away the colonist's "English-ness?"

    I would love to know the answer.

  59. marie-lucie said,

    January 20, 2009 @ 11:19 pm

    Even Hebrew was considered as an alternative to English, but the proposal was rejected as much too impractical.

  60. sleepnothavingness said,

    January 21, 2009 @ 4:28 am

    If you can't read this, blame a teacher.
    If you can't read this in English, blame a soldier.

    Or did I miss something?

  61. Andrew said,

    January 21, 2009 @ 6:27 am

    method: My understanding is that a proposal was considered that all official documents be written in German as well as English, in order to aid international commmunication. The idea that German was to replace English is, I think, a myth.

    [(myl) Dennis Barron discusses the facts and the myths in detail here.]

    [(amz) That's Baron. The Barron misspelling comes from the source that quoted Dennis Baron's blog.]

  62. David said,

    January 21, 2009 @ 10:08 am

    There's a bit of folk history around some few items of trivia that I absorbed in school about Benjamin Franklin (believed that the national bird should be the turkey, proposed German as the national language, other eccentricities).

    I'd not heard about the "German as national language hoax", but was aware that some patriots believed that congress in its infancy should adopt a classical language, maybe in opposition to speaking English, just as likely due to admiration for classical ideals. German was until the 20th century regarded internationally as the language of science, much as English now is. Again, status as the "language of science" was incidental, basically historical accident, and had more to do with a language's being spoken in an industrial nation that had distanced itself from the Roman Catholic Church.

    [ On Ben Franklin's thoughts on German in America, see here. — Eric ]

  63. David said,

    January 21, 2009 @ 1:52 pm

    Didn't Franklin then publish a German language newspaper in Philadelphia? I wouldn't be convinced that he was always of one mind about the language. Circa 1751, he was still a professed British subject and loyalist as well.

  64. Jens Fiederer said,

    January 22, 2009 @ 12:02 am

    Bulbul:

    Perhaps I was hasty….to be more exact, if you grew up in an Eastern bloc country such as Czechoslovakia (it was overbearing of me to speak of all countries in that area as though they were the same), and had some awareness of the history (such as how before the Russians had control and they had to learn Russian in school, people had to learn German under the Austro-Hungarian empire (the Mucha museum, for example, has notes next to its paintings discussing the agitation for teaching in the Czech language), you would have a fair chance of seeing the connection between language teaching and military control.

    While the bumper sticker overstates the case, bumper stickers are rarely the place for a detailed argument.

  65. Joseph McVeigh said,

    January 22, 2009 @ 10:02 am

    I haven't read all the comments on here, but has anyone seen a bumper sticker saying "If we lost the Vietnam War, then why aren't we speaking Vietnamese?" I saw this gem of national pride (xenophobia?) on a car in Indianapolis and its ridiculousness amazed me. I think it could be justified as support for our veterans, like the sticker above, but other than that it just screams of stupidity and bigotry, not to mention laziness because the question that poped into my mind was "If Germany lost World War II, why aren't the Germans speaking English?" But I guess that would be asking too much.

  66. W. Kiernan said,

    January 22, 2009 @ 11:06 am

    If you can read this, thank a farmer, an obstetrician, a well-digger, the man who invented penicillin, the friend who introduced your Mom and Dad, etc., etc.

    Now if you can read this, thank Al Gore!

  67. heather em said,

    January 22, 2009 @ 8:09 pm

    Hm. Wouldn't it be interesting if this bumper sticker actually said something helpful, interesting, or thought-provoking, instead of just invoking a snide "what if"? Although, i guess that's not really what bumper stickers are for (at least not the majority of them).
    This just makes me want one that says, "If your military-issue gun doesn't jam, thank a taxpayer", or something equally aggressive and besides the point. Is that just me?
    Save The Whales!

  68. Got Medieval said,

    January 22, 2009 @ 8:35 pm

    Actually, sleepnothavingness, the correct contrapositives would be:

    If you can't thank a teacher, you cannot read this.
    If you can't thank a soldier, you cannot read this in English.

  69. Otto Kerner said,

    January 22, 2009 @ 9:07 pm

    I'm afraid I don't really get what's hard to get about this. A military basically has two main functions: to invade other countries and to resist invasion by other countries. Therefore, for people who are not interested in foreign conquest, the whole reason that the U.S. military exists at all is to prevent the U.S. from being conquered. When a country is conquered by a foreign military, this can readily lead to major demographic shifts (via massacres and expulsions) as well as long-term assimilationist policies, and that can result in a different language becoming predominant. On the other hand, a stable regime is much more likely to encourage the use of the same language over time. There are many places in the world of which we can say that, had some previous regime's soldiers been more successful, some language would still be spoken there. To take a random example, I could put up a sign in northern Xinjiang, written in demotic Dzunghar in the Clear Script, reading "If you can read this in Dzunghar, thank the khan's soldiers", except that very few people would be able to read it, precisely because the khan's soldiers lost.

    So, I don't really understand the question, "When has the U.S. military ever been involved in protecting the English language from the apparent onslaught of non-English languages?". Certainly, there are now or have been in the past some people who would have been interested in invading the U.S. if an invasion had been feasible; and it would be very surprising if none of those miscreants had ever been non-English speakers.

    Now, if the point here is that having a standing army is unnecessary for the defence of North America against invasion, I am quite sympathetic. Most people, however, are not. "Abolish the armed forces" is not an issue that raised much interest during the presidential election—not even from marginal candidates in the Democratic primary. Even in the more left-oriented countries of Europe, I don't remember a major candidate running on a "no military" platform. So, the bumper-sticker is simply speaking from the perspective of common sense and consensus.

  70. Eric Baković said,

    January 23, 2009 @ 4:41 pm

    @Otto and others —

    These remarks in my post were meant to be sarcastic:

    When has the U.S. military ever been involved in protecting the English language from the apparent onslaught of non-English languages? […] I don't see it as anything more than a random conflation of two views mostly associated with U.S. conservativism: English-only and appreciation for (the actions of) the military.

    Though nobody said this explicitly, many of you point out (in some form or another) that this is simply an instance of metonymy: ability to read in English is a stand-in for all that it means to be American as opposed to some other nationality. So, we have our military to thank for keeping all that it means to be American safe.

    I get that. (And I got it the first time, despite the fact that my remarks suggested otherwise.) I guess I just think the metonym is lame (and a little disturbing). Of all the things that it means to be American, whoever first came up with this slogan basically thought that the ability to read in English stood out as quintessential, or at the very least particularly noteworthy. Really? This is what I have to be thankful to the military for? I suppose English reading ability is pretty helpful given that English is a kind of de facto global language and all… but wait, isn't that essentially a result of the fact that the most powerful nation in the world primarily uses English? Hmm. It's just all twisted and backwards to me. There are so many other things that I'm ready and willing to thank our military for; my ability to read in English is just not high on the list.

    Some commenters helpfully point out that the second part of the slogan was a kind of response to the platitude expressed in first part ("if you can read this, thank a teacher"), which was (probably) its own bumper sticker slogan first. But this response was already made — rather magnificently, I might add — by "if you can read this, you're too close". Not that there can't be multiple responses to a platitude, mind you, but if you're not going to improve on the original, why bother?

    So I stand by my expression of a lack of understanding of the slogan. I don't get it, not because I don't get it, but because I think there's nothing to get: it fails both as a metonym and as a response. (On the other hand, if it was intended to make liberals like me grumble inconsequentially, the intention succeeded perfectly.) Feel free to disagree: comments continue to be open.

  71. Otto Kerner said,

    January 25, 2009 @ 3:02 pm

    It didn't occur to me that the use of a metonymy where X stands for Y implies that X is the most important or salient part of Y. I read this bumper sticker as saying nothing significant about the English language at all; I thought it meant simply, "Thank a soldier that the Americans have not been wiped out or made a subject people." I think that's a perfectly acceptable way to use metonymy.

  72. Jim said,

    March 10, 2009 @ 10:01 am

    "If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read this in English, then thank the Navy!"

    I believe was in reference to the fact that the Royal Navy defended the Island from all foreign armies and so ensured the viability of the English Language, probably during Elizabethan times…

    The fact it has been changed by the pongo's/grunts to "soldier" doesn't surprise me, as everyone takes from the "senior service"…;)

  73. Lonewolf_gen said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 11:06 am

    The funny thing is that we never really needed saving from anything. The Cherokee and Pequot languages were here before, "we," whoever that means were here. Then came some cruisaders and travelers worldwide with tons of other languages to add to this beatiful melting pot. So the bumper sticker is stupid. It destroys and pokes fun at everythign this country has been made up of from the beginning. It is not unAmerican to speak another language. It is the very thing that America was built on. So I say welcome other languages and don't see it as some sort of attack on who you are because that is how "Americans" saw your ancestors when they arrived here. Native Americans saw it as an attack when the English settlers got here, and so on and so forth. This country was made from different people from all over the world settling here and making it colorful and full of tons of languages. Embrace it, because it will never change. We don;t have to protect ourselves from the Spanish speakign Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, or the Patua speaking Jamaicans, or the Chinese speaking Chinese, etc. We should welcome and learn from one another. The bumper sticker is ignorant.

  74. Stephanie B. said,

    June 5, 2011 @ 8:02 pm

    I recently saw a terrific version of this that read:
    "If you can read this, thank a teacher.
    If you are aloud to read this, thank a soldier."

    (Copied verbatim – I swear! – from the marquee of the gas station down the street from my house.)

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