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 tongue to the lands it conquered — one of whose descendants, through another empire, the Spanish, reached further still. English too has had its empire, and still has it through one of its offspring, now the world’s ruler. But this time the expansion is far more select. The new English no longer cares for our everyday vulgarity, which we are free to go on speaking in our subjugated tongues. It prefers to be the lingua franca of world commerce. Every profitable activity must pass beneath its shadow. If a man writes his meditations, he does so in his mother tongue. But if what he wants is to prosper, he writes a paper in English, or at least an 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 get to without English? And so what nineteenth-century idealists called spirit has been driven 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 flung at us laced with anglicisms that remind us where the source of our dreams now lies. They dream on our behalf in the common idiom of collective fantasy. Into that world fits anything profitable, and the 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 call out for arousal, everyone uses it. The accents of every nation mingle in pornography — sexual or sentimental — stammering 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.