In high school I half-heartedly "studied" the German language in order to fulfill the language requirement that all acceptable universities had. My other option was Spanish, a language that actually has some serious global use and would have done me some good in the barrio where I now live. On my first trip to Germany many years ago I found that what I'd learned was already obsolescent, as languages change over time.

When I was stationed in Japan I learned some Japanese - enough to order a beer and make the right sounds during a game of go (which I always lost to even seven-year-olds). In the Philippines I bought a book on Tagalog, but everyone spoke English so well I don't remember cracking it at all.

When I found I'd be spending a lot of time in Turkey, I convinced the dayjob management to send me to Berlitz to learn Turkish. That did earn me some respect in the negotiating I did there for the next several years.

None of that was really necessary. I've been to a dozen countries on business and a handful for other reasons and English is enough to get around just fine. I know it sounds insufferably parochial, but English is the global language.

Those English folks got around and had no ethical problem making huge populations learn their language so the few administrators and their enforcers wouldn't have to learn the foreign tongue. And they sent dissidents to America and Australia to get them off the streets of London and conserve space in various gaols. And in addition to conquest and forced resettlement, they traded a bit too so pretty much all parts of the globe were infested with English (the language and the people).

In hindsight, that's a good thing. The English language is pretty forgiving and welcoming. A glance through a dictionary inspecting word origins will find that most have been imported and others have evolved, and fixed spelling only became important in the 19th Century. When studying German I was amazed at how many English words German used, but in truth it was the opposite - English absorbs other languages like a sponge absorbs cat puke.

Oh, there was one place I visited where English wasn't strictly enough. You've guessed it already: France. Two places - also Quebec. But struggling with a little French ultimately pays off when the object of the directed conversation becomes magically fluent in English. Tip the hat, pay the respects.

In addition to English picking up words from pretty much any convenient source, it's also a very flexible and accommodating language in other ways. Almost any concept can be expressed. Not always beautifully, and sometimes awkwardly, but everything from technical concepts and mathematics to poetry and music are handled well. When I was in Turkey I found that the universities there teach all technical courses in English because Turkish cannot express the concepts well. German is a wonderful technical language, with rigid grammatical rules and word constructions that can build single-word concepts that are complete and exact. The same applies to philosophy, the root of technology. But there are delicate poetical things that German stumbles over. Maybe the single main limiter of German is that Germany kept losing wars.

There are bad things about English too, of course. It is a seriously irrational language in daily use. Spelling rules, which these days are important, are silly. And all rules have exceptions. Remember diagramming sentences back in junior high? Remember all the apparently tacked on lines and brackets that would never have been there if the language were a product of planning? Imagine yourself to be an immigrant just beginning to learn English. That's gotta be a bitch. (Imagine facing the previous sentence and trying to make any sense of it.)

Yeah, yeah, English rules! We can all pat ourselves on the back and try to take some credit for that, but it had nothing at all to do with us. It had to do with the East India Company and the Bank of England, Wm. Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and the profligate greed of that island nation (following in the footsteps of the Hansiatic League - the Angles and Saxons and such). But it has benefited native English speakers, at a cost to others. I do sometimes feel guilty about that (though it has nothing to do with me personally). Maybe I'll study Mandarin now. Probably not.

This is the lovely Angela, photographed in a hotel bath tub in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. She studies German.