You never know which ones of your pieces are going to get around. Last week World Affairs published an essay I wrote exploring whether it would necessarily be such a horrible thing if only one language were spoken in the world.

I write that within a context: of the 6000 languages on earth, it is estimated that only about 600 will exist a hundred years from now. The big languages are edging the tiny ones, and even the medium-sized ones, out. In recent centuries, this has been first because of active extermination--Native Americans were often forbidden to speak their home languages in school--and later because of “globalization”: children raised in a city by migrant parents are unlikely to learn the language their parents spoke back in the village.

Meanwhile, there are efforts of revive languages that are no longer spoken or are in danger of being no longer spoken, such as Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Maori (Mark Abley’s book Spoken Here is a nice introduction, journalism-style, to such programs).

However, in these cases what seems to be happening is more that the languages are living as what I have called elsewhere “taught languages,” spoken by almost no one from the cradle, mainly used as second languages by a dedicated set but hardly an entire country of people. Even this is great. Yet in 2009 the simple fact is that there is a single example of a language brought alive from the page and now used as a native language by a massive population of users: Hebrew, and that was a very unusual story driven by a unique confluence of religious commitment, a sudden mixture of people speaking many different languages, and arrangements such as children early in the experiment that became modern Israel being removed from their parents and raised on kibbutzes where only Hebrew was spoken. This kind of thing can’t ever happen in, say, Ireland.

Many address this issue as a threat to linguistic “diversity”--a diversity which I have revelled in avocationally my entire life and vocationally for most of it. However, given current realities, I ask in the essay whether this diversity is essentially an aesthetic issue, that we could approach largely with a dedicated commitment to documenting languages before they are no longer spoken. Along those lines, I also ask whether it would really be, in itself, such a horrible thing if all humans spoke one language.

Opinions will differ, but I worry that in the publicity the piece is getting, I am going to be thought to have said, or “implied,” three things which I did not mean to.

First: Contrary to the Times’ innocent sum-up of my point Sunday as “It doesn’t make sense to try to save dying languages,” I do think they should be saved, on paper and in recordings, diligently and copiously. This is much of what linguistics is about, and I have even contributed in writing a grammar (to appear) of a minority language (although it is not in immediate danger of death). I just question whether we can maintain them as spoken languages. I outline all of this in my The Power of Babel, where it is clear that I am not among those who simply shrug at the thought of indigenous languages dying. Linguists who teach sometimes encounter a cheeky undergrad who, when you do a lecture on language death, raises his hand and says “Why should we care?” That question from “that guy” chills me a bit just as it does other linguists.

Second: The sentence that seems to be excerpted most from my essay is “At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together.” And it is--but I make that statement late in the piece, in the wake of assorted other points made sequentially. In isolation I would put it that:

“At the end of the day, despite the tragic--yet irreversible--horrors of aggression, dislocation and cultural extermination, the diminution in the number of the world’s languages is ironically a symptom of unity.”

The sentence getting around the web in isolation can be taken as implying that I see, for example, Wounded Knee as people “coming together.” I do not. It’s just that once a language is no longer spoken, it is so very, very difficult to make it a spoken language again--in which case new questions must be asked.

Third: Finally, I hope the piece does not give any sense that I think of English as somehow “better” than other languages. I do write that if it ends up being the last one, we could do worse than one that is relatively easy to learn the basics of--no gender, few conjugational endings, etc. However, in my other writings I think it is clear that I have no interest in the idea that English is uniquely “subtle” because of its mixed-heritage vocabulary, and have widely argued that grammatically, in many ways English is a rather coarse tongue because of aspects of its history (my Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue from last year explains much of this). My entire career as a linguist is founded, ultimately, on envying people speaking other languages and finding my own faintly homely. My statements in the essay about English are not advocational, but descriptive.

What drove me to write the essay was, genuinely, what I mention at the end: let’s imagine what it would be like if we spoke one language. Whether it’s English is beside the point; imagine it being, say, an African “click” language, Thai, or Navajo. The question--one I see as worthy of posing amidst a debate that will take in a great deal else--is, as I write: “whether there is some urgent benefit to humanity from the fact that some people speak click languages, while others speak Ket or thousands of others, instead of everyone speaking in a universal tongue.”

To strike a note I generally avoid, I am offended. And by a cartoon. Has anybody noticed what a patronizing mess Seth MacFarlane’s new The Cleveland Show is?

Cleveland is the pudgy, mild-mannered drawling pal of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, who now has, in the parlance of the grand old days of the seventies television spinoff, “his own show.” And indeed, the whole notion of the show is in quotation marks in a sense. The premise, for example, is willfully as hokey as those of the old-time spinoffs (“Mary’s friend Phyliss moves to San Francisco to live with her ex-husband’s parents ...”).

While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University.

Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time?

At a Christmas party in 2004, a cousin asked me "Do you like Medea?" For a minute I was a confused, since it didn’t seem to be the occasion for sharing our impressions of Greek mythology. But it turned out she was talking about Madea, the massive, loudmouthed, pistol-packing black grandmother who Tyler Perry performs as in drag in a series of "chitlin' circuit" touring shows.

Perry sells DVDs of the shows on line, and ten minutes after my cousin put one on I was hooked. I’m not alone. Madea was the biggest new phenom in black America until Obamamania. The new film I Can Do Bad All By Myself is the seventh in a series of films getting across the Tyler Perry message, most of them based on the plays, and making more money than anyone expected when plans for the first one, Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), were announced.

I used to try to read every book that came over the transom. That didn’t last long, but there are always those amidst the flow that grab my attention, and among them, a few that really stick with me. Lately I have been struck by three.

Marcus LiBrizzi exhumes the story of the tiny Atusville community on the outskirts of a small town in Maine (Lost Atusville: A Black Settlement from the American Revolution). Atusville was a black district – but not one of the grand old bustling commercial black meccas that thrived in most large American cities until the fifties like Chicago’s Bronzeville. It consisted of a few dozen people from a small collection of families, with a surprising number of interracial marriages that seem not to have attracted particular notice, from the community’s founding couple in the 1700s to the parents of the last resident, after whose death in 1965 the community ceased to exist.

With the Obama Administration letting Green Jobs czar Van Jones resign, questions as to whether these people have any spine are becoming sadly legitimate. What, precisely, would have been wrong with letting Glenn Beck and the others keep screaming their heads off about Jones’ purported radical intentions? Why not do a Glinda and dismiss this nonsense with a breezy “You have no power here”?

After all, we are faced here not with serious charges. There are no modern-day Whittaker Chambers in this crowd. The Republican smears against Obama of late are nonsense, pure and simple.

Last Sunday’s third episode of this season’s Mad Men was one of the best in the series on many levels, which was why for me, a frequent little problem with the show stood out more than ever. Namely, the show’s depiction of how people speak is less accurate than the loving exactitude with attire, cocktails, product labels, and the like.

The most glaring example in this episode was what seems to have gone down as a memorable line from Peggy Olson, erstwhile secretary who is slowly climbing the corporate ladder. “I’m in a good place right now,” she says, which is dramatically compelling – it makes Peggy seem “cool,” a proto-feminist on her way to our modern reality, in contrast to what a dowdy little twinkie she seemed to be when we first met her. But would that woman use that expression in 1963?

Jan Freeman’s column Sunday, subbing for William Safire, on what Ambrose Bierce--along with others--considered “bad language” a hundred years ago was a delight. Ever been self-conscious about the difference between various and several? Did you know that talented is a “vile and barbarous vocable” because there is no verb to talent?

The drifting changes in the links between cultural alignments and political ones over time are always interesting, such as the fact that Republicans were once more interested in black rights than Democrats. It’s equally true in black history. Culturally, Booker T. Washington was much more of what is currently recognized as “culturally black” than W.E.B. DuBois, as were the legions of sharecroppers and urban poor moved by Washington’s example more than DuBois’ (DuBois’ picture rarely hung on walls).

Another resonant example of how contingent the connections between cultural and political alignments always are is author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Celebrated today for her documentation of rural black folklore and her explorations of the black female condition in, especially, her tour de force novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston the actual person would be as much at home on Fox News as on National Public Radio.

So they had their beer. Teachable Moment. What have we learned?

Something--but not what I sense will get much press in the aftermath.

Directly from The Beer--not much. Gates and Crowley had an “exchange,” although about what we are not to know. And they intend to have more such exchange. Of some sort. All very civil.

Gates has said he’ll be putting together a documentary about the profiling issue. Which means that a year or so from now it will air and get briefish, genuflective reviews from people like Virginia Heffernan and then be forgotten as quickly as CNN’s Black in America specials, or that Black.White thing a few years ago. Remember the one where whites made up as black and blacks made up as whites and fun ensued? What lessons are we now carrying from that “teachable” occasion?

Gates-gate is the culmination of one of those occasional spates of race-related events that occur and flow into one another over a month or so. These spates are, in fact, precisely the “conversation” on race that Attorney General Eric Holder claims does not happen in America.

What, after all, has all of this talk been from the Ricci decision through to the uproar over what happened on Henry Louis Gates’ front porch? If this hasn’t been conversation, of a thoroughly vital nature, then there is a fundamental disagreement as to what conversation is.

There is nothing glib to say, in any responsible sense, about Henry Louis Gates' arrest last week, which is this week's big race story. Its value is as an object lesson in why, with a black President, there remains a contingent convinced that America is still all about racism.

Gates' belligerence--"Why, because I'm a black man in America?"--may not have been pretty. However, tarring him as a professional racebaiter is inaccurate. One senses here a lazy analogy with his former Harvard Afro-American Studies department colleague Cornel West.