In ancient Rome, Greek was the language of culture, so much so that even the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in it. The empire, however, was Rome, and Rome gave its language to the lands it conquered — one of whose descendants, through another empire, the Spanish, reached even further. English, too, has had its empire, and still has it through one of its offspring, now turned into a global ruler. But this time the expansion is far more selective. The new English no longer takes any interest in our everyday vulgarity, which we are free to go on speaking in our subjugated tongues. It prefers to be the lingua franca of world trade. Every profitable activity must pass beneath its shadow. If someone writes their meditations, they do so in their mother tongue. But if what they need is to prosper, they will write a paper in English, or at least include the abstract in that language. Without that formality, the quality of the content matters little. Spanish still has its small market, but where do a Finn, a Croat, a Malay, a Dutchman, or a Telugu speaker go without English? And so what nineteenth-century idealists used to call spirit has been forced into a corner among the rigid structures of the language of business and engineering. All its knowledge is transmitted and codified in the English infinitive — the simple, perfect verb for the language of machines. The public language, the language of commerce, is hurled at us underlined with anglicisms that remind us where the source of our dreams now lies. They dream on our behalf in the common idiom of the collective fantasy. Into that world fits anything that is profitable, and the simpler, plainer, and more direct it is, the more anglified. No one writes poetry or meditations in English, unless he is some department-store snob; but to moan, to scream, to summon arousal, everyone uses it. The accents of every nation blend together in pornography — sexual or sentimental — and stammer out a few English expressions that everyone understands. English is, above all, the language of porn — so much so that even its bitterest enemies speak it when they film themselves fucking.