It can be hard to make yourself understood

It was Clowns in clownface vs Clowns in Brown Shirts and the pretend clowns came out on top.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

What does English look like?

A NSFW example of kinetic typography from a scene in "Pulp Fiction."

Cartoons' laughter dubbed in different languages

That's "South Park" (of course with swearing) and an unembeddable "Simpsons" is here (of course with snarkiness).

Germany finds acting like America is hard

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said attempts to build a multicultural society have "utterly failed." 

She said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate - including learning German.

That country that was divided by war is having problem living  at peace with itself.

He says one language unites us, and stumps for votes in Spanish

Florida's GOP candidate for US Senate, Marc Rubio is on the English-only bandwagon and campaigns in Spanish.

N. Korea speaking in English

North Korea -- a place where few speak English, few have computers and even fewer still have internet access -- has opened an English language website. Not only that, the totalitarian state is more hip than your mom:

"... it has strengthened web propaganda by opening accounts at popular websites like YouTube and Twitter."

Oblivious to the novel allusions

US English awarded an "A" to members of Congress who supported the group's xenophobic paranoia about the alleged fragility of English.

“Nearly every congressional district in the United States is experiencing an increase in the population that struggles with English.”

Forget that America was discovered by a guy exploring for Spain

The OC Weekly (Orange County, Calif,) reports that the city planner in a Spanish-named town, with city designs inspired by Spain, doesn't like Spanish-based street names because he can't pronounce them.

Historically, Mission Viejo has had street names drawn from Spanish. After all, the Dispatch points out, the city's original developer sent representatives to Spain in the 1960s to get design ideas for the new master-planned community.

The issue came up at a planning commission meeting, leading Lennar to submit a new batchof more Mission Viejo-ish names, like "Via Cielo" and "Via Panorama."

Planning commissioner Robert Bruchmann, though, wishes they'd kept the old names. Here's part of his letter to the Mission Viejo Dispatch:

"Frankly I liked the initial submission of names [by Lennar], mainly because I can pronounce them."

A law without power to solve a problem they don't have

The town of Forty Fort, near Wilkes-Barre, PA, intends to pass English-only law despite it having no power and there being no need, according to the Times Leader:

"... the ordinance is powerless in insulating the borough from action dictated by higher governments. While he did not know of any Pennsylvania state or federal laws requiring municipal documents be printed in languages other than English, should such a law be made, Dyller said, Forty Fort would be bound to follow it, ordinance or not.

“It doesn’t insulate them from anything,” he said. “What it does is tell Hispanic people: stay out.”"

Getting it wrong so often as to be right

University of Pennsylvania's  Language Log reports that the single most authoritarian source of English words, the Oxford English Dictionary, has added the word "eggcorn" as a variant of "acorn" since misuse has become so entrenched that the misused word is the embodiment of a whole category of misuses.

As early as 1844, people were reinterpreting the word “acorn” as “eggcorn”, either deliberately, for humorous purposes, or in all innocence, in a struggle to analyse, in a way that made sense to them, what the word’s spelling must be: acorns are, after all, seeds which are somewhat egg-shaped, and in many dialects the formations acorn and eggcorn sound very similar. Since 2003, it has become a widely accepted term for this category of words as a whole, appearing in books and journals, and on the internet, often alongside its musical sibling, the mondegreen or misheard lyric (which first appeared in the OED in 2002). As such, it has now become an autological word: one which belongs to the category it describes.

English was just one language of the 13 colonies

So many people spoke German at the time of the country's creation that a bill was offered at the time to have laws printed in that language. That story got twisted into the apocryphal tale of German nearly being the official language of the United States.

DEA be wantin' a Prof. Henry Higgins

ABC News reports the federal government is searching for an Ebonics translator.

Such experts, he said, would likely be used -- as with many federal linguists -- to assist with wiretaps and linguistic profiling, when a person's accent or dialect can help lead investigators to the criminal.

"They probably want reliable expertise to make sure they've got an accurate interpretation for what is said," he said."Because there's the perception in many minds that you don't need a translator, people believe they've understood something when they haven't."

We bark, mewl, buzz and parrot

Just because there's a fly in the butter, doesn't mean it's a butterfly. A cat is hardly like a catfish, nor a dog like a dogwood, and ditto for a floxglove and fox. Then we can start on idioms: cat out of the bag, no dog in that hunt, flygirls, and foxy lady.... and some folks think that first and second generation immigrants should just cope with the language's oddities and still expect them to interact with government and business at the same level as others.

But being America means giving everyone equal access to the opportunities and benefits of democracy.

"You won't need some of these words for months and months"