Author: Logan Lo

There’s a reason why the English language has taken over the world

On the way back from the fight, was chatting with the younger coach about books. He’s a voracious reader, which I both admire and envy. I used to read a book a week for years but then life got in the way.

Told him that the French and English are like Judo and BJJ.

In 1634, Cardinal Richelieu – the bad guy from the Three Musketeers – created the Académie française to preserve the French Language.

Essentially, the French language didn’t take on any foreign words if at all possible. In 1994, the Toubon laws were passed to make it a civil wrong to use an English word when a French equivalent existed.

Meanwhile, the English language refused to create an academy to “preserve” the English language so that soon, we had many words that all mean kinda the same thing like:

• Give
• Bequeath
• Devise

But each one is slightly different. Because of this, the English language has far more words than French. Far more.

How many words does the French language have? Less than 100,000 words, and 35,000 common words.

How many words does the English language have? It has 1,013,913 as of June 10, 2009 at 10:22AM GMT.

If you think of a word like a tool, each tool is made for a specific task. To bequeath something means, “To give something that you can hold, to someone else, after you die.”

It’s the difference between “Keylock” (traditional Judo) and “Kimura,” “Americana,” and “Straight armlock” (three BJJ terms for the one Judo term). BJJ takes whatever it’s offered; if it works, it stays, if it doesn’t, it goes away.

It’s a pure meritocracy.

History has repeatedly shown one thing: Those things, people, places, cultures, that accept change, survive. The things that are rigid and intolerant, fade away.

French was the language of the world until the end of WWI. Prior to that, Otto von Bismark was said to have been asked what was the most important modern historical event? He replied, “That the North Americans speak English.”

He knew where the world was headed.

Wrote once that there’s a vast difference between broken and bendy.

If you aspire to be anything in life, aspire to be bendy.

Mood: full
Music:Demain sera pour tous un lendemain qui ne peut pas mentir
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We don’t have a word that’s the opposite of “fragile” – we should

This week is the first week I’ve had where I haven’t had a million deadlines so I’m easing back into normalcy. The weird thing is that high levels of pressure have been the norm for me for the past two months or so, so it’s hard for me to go back to having a bit of extra time again.

In some ways, it was a welcome distraction from not being able to go the gym and such.

Years ago, I wrote about this term called the Black Swan, which means a completely unforeseeable event that has a huge historical impact – like 9/11. A fella named Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a whole book on the subject with the apt subtitle: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Anywho, Taleb coined another word he calls, Antifragile.

If fragility means that something breaks under stress, note that the English language has no antonym – we have no word that means grows stronger under stress.

In other words, the opposite of fragile is not sturdy nor resilient. When something is fragile, it becomes weaker when stressed. There is no word that means, Becomes stronger when stressed.

I think that most things do, though. Isn’t that how muscles are made, how iron is forged? One puts these things through stress and only then does it grow stronger.

Of course, if the stress is so great that it kills you, you’ve gone too far.

There are things, then, that happen that make us fragile and things that make us anti-fragile. I like to think that that most things make us anti-fragile.

We are still here, after all, no?

Mood: oddly relaxed
Music: these shoulders hold up so much, they won’t budge
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