1. Artemidoris (Julius Caesar), English. 1.5 billion

 1. Artemidoris (Julius Caesar), English. 1.5 billion native speakers

    The largest language in the world in 2026, it is the Shakespearean giant and widespread global lingua franca. Many of us have been born and raised in it, immersed by many former colonies where the sun never set on the vast British empire. Based on wealth and power, wars fought and trade agreements and commerce enforced, Hollywood and musical magic crossing the airwaves in all directions.

    This is the biggest ocean on the planet, and it grows every day. Indians speak it more than ever, as do people in Africa and other far flung parts of the planet. I and we read its literature.

    The Alpha language, the ubiquitous waters of an everflowing mass: from Chaucer to the Bard, Melville to Hemingway, Vonnegut to King. 

    I am 55. At least 50 of my years I have been listening, conversing, and reading it, primarily. American drawls and properly enunciated grammar from Harvard scholars, the Queen's English, the pidgin from Sierra Leone or of the Bahamas. Even when surrounded by other seas and waters, like Spanish and Arabic and even German, this is the ocean of my basis and life. I have spent more time from it than many U.S. folks, yet it is still the main mode and method of my understanding and operation.

    Even the foreign favorite authors we read in our native tongue: Allende, Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. Perhaps Chinua Achebe of Nigeria composed his works in English, I imagine. Naghib Mafouz of Egypt, Garcia Marquez of Colombia, Miguel de Cervantes of Spain. Goethe of Germany or Ibsen of Norway.

    It seems they all come to us. Conrad of Poland, actually perfected his craft in English. Now we have more speakers than ever: the flow of English, the hybrid developed in the United Kingdom of Tudors or Stuarts and the other royals surrounding them, the mix of Latin and Germanic, with differing options between the the more Roman versus the hinterland of principalities and tribes with their gutteral utterances.

    Artedimoris: our massive ocean of language surrounding us, encompassing us in the empire of "yes, no, and maybe so."

 Swimming and Diving in Languages and Cultures

    Investigating life and its viccisitudes. Which may be less of the latter, and simply more of the patterns that have been established for eons. The universe, and God, and the spirits of all the astral plains may all combine to form and unify what we know about the what, the who, the why. And the past, the present, the future.

    Nothing much more than that, right?

    I cannot claim to understand nor especially believe in all the things that Noam Chomsky posits about language and culture, but I wished to add my own thoughts.

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    Languages and cultures can be compared to oceans, seas, and smaller bodies of water. A huge language and its consequent cultures and subcultures.

    Enlgish and Chinese (Mandarin) would be the biggest in 2026, comparable to the Pacific and the Atlantic, the two biggest oceans. More people might be born speaking Chinese, but more people end up learning English as a secondary tongue.

    Now with Nigeria and India having so many people, maybe English is now the biggest native language world wide. I will name them, the biggest languages being the ones coinciding with characters of Shakespeare, starting with A, continuing through them alphabetically.

    1. Artemidoris (Julius Caesar), English. 1.5 billion

    2. Bolingbroke (HenryVI), Chinese Mandarin 1.1 billion

    3. Calchas (Troilus and Cressida), Hindi. 600 million

    4. Desdemona (Anthony and Cleopatra), Spanish, 560 million

    5. Eglamour (Two Gentlemen of Verona), French, 320 million

    6. Falconbridge (King John), Arabic, 310 million.

    7. Gaoler (Comedy of Errors), Bengali, 280 million.

    8. Hecate (Macbeth), Portuguese, 265 million.

    9. Imogen (Symboline), Russian, 255 million.

    10. Julia (Measure for Measure), Urdu, 230 million.

    The next 10: Indonesian, Standard German, Japanese, Nigerian Pidgin, Marathi, Telegu, Turkish, Tamil, Yue Chinese, and Vietnamese. 

 Inferiority Complex and Feeling Like an Obliged Servant - Not a Slave

    In my case, my life seemed pretty solid and confident, but some things started to chip away at the self-belief or confidence, you might say. Maybe the tenacity or persistenc

    Losing a baby foster girl became a sort of unrelenting dread or hole in the soul, maybe, but it was not the worst. She did not die. She just left. Maybe it worked on me (and my family?) over time. Fair to say. Maybe age does those things more. Or perhaps other travails of life. 

    Parents breaking up made for some hard days, weeks, or months. I do not think it turned into years, but it had its effect. Things happen. For me it was the time of middle school, which might have been inopportune. But things worked out okay We kept moving on, and the parents found new partners and happiness. Word problems in math became trialsome and frustration. That worked on my self-belief or confidence, I am pretty sure. Cooking was awful with the amount of weight loss formula problems, earning me a C. A C in cooking. But not having to do with cooking. Weight Watchers calculations. Stupid. I was not naturally good nor interested in the computer class, either.

    High school brought some troublesome ways of hurting my confidence. I did not stay in tip tip shape, or compete much in competitive sports. My math turned out to be poor, and that translated into some other sciences. Apathy plus the natural inclination to be befuddled and perplexed by solving math problems was hard on me, my grades, my ego. Teachers who did not explain things really got my goat. I was having a hard enough time caring, and then Mr. Girdley comes along. Oaf and buffoon. He dragged me down into his morass or stubborn jackassery. Sure. Resentful of him, but more importantly myself.

    I let myself be distracred, not pushing hard enough, like Scott Hollenbeck. Lovely guy. Died too young, but heroically. He had confidence, and swag. Great human being. God wanted him back.

    Guys like me, at times too apathetic and not naturally gifted to solves many problems, made it to another decade, and got lucky in marriage, but certainly not professions and academics and many other things.

    Derived from my nature, perhaps not perspicacious enough, taking blows and maybe not resilient enough. Not caring enough. Sometimes laying too low.

    Have to care more. Try harder. Not give up too soon. Make wiser choices. Do better.

    But alas, a lot of us do not have the same ethics or personal character. Enough for enough, but not super like some.

    That is me.

    I am a servant and obliged, but not a slave. I am free, a free person. I have earned some freedom, but submitted myself to some duties and causes. Some make me feel bit trapped or cornered.

    We want to do things because we love to do them. Bu that can be a tricky game.

    Do we have the consitution or resolution? The resolve and grit? Maybe not.

    Maybe so.

    In the end, I am the hero dedicated to the right, and I will do the right thing. The right things.

    But we are here in the in between times, and there are times where I am inferior, for many of the above reasons, and few not mentioned.

    We have limits and capacities, hang ups and complexes. Not all are inferior.

    Sometimes we can be infused with lusts, like for some kind of romantic dream or conquest, or even to end the threat of those that threaten us. To mete out some kind of justice or goal that we undertake, for the greater good, maybe society or your team, or your family or your ego.

    All of those things can mix up. Pride and ego, and prejudice and passion.

    Fickle caprices and deep-seated longings and apprehensions, or powerful dreams or hopes or aspirations.

    Obejctives and plans.

    To be free, and a noble servant to all.

    

    

 Being Here and There

    I was attending a small class in South America,

    A small class with the august and emminent Gonzalo Rojas

    The poet, and learned scholar.

    Friend and colleague of Nobel winners, living and dead.

    He was old, and wise, and erudite.

    I know I learned things from him and them, perhaps I should have taken better notes.

    More inspiration, more analytical prowess.

    Chileans have created their stories, their cuentos

    They and their neighbors, across mountains and borders.

     Naming them: Borges, Salazar, Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez.

    Luminaries and large portents go with them.

    Of course there are many, many others. Hartos

    As they say in the land of Auracanians, los mapuche

    Mixed as mestizos crossed with criollos and Europeans

    The western world has met once again, time after time.

    I learned some things from him, perhaps not much transversely.

    As things are.

    He liked the words or analyses of Ian Hasegawa,

    The Japanese-Irish Canadian, from the northern plains.

    Having lived in the country of the penguins south of me.

    Land of legends and myths and heroic natives, with names known 

    on streets and vecindarios

    Most natives of the country looked at them as champions,

    Despite dark and ignominious fates.

    The nation evolved and survived.

    Mixed blood and shared histories.

    A nation comes together.

    

    A nation and people, un pueblo, to be respected.

    Don Gonzalo was more than just from Chile. He was all of South American

    More like Che Guevara

    He of the motorcyle diaries and more

    Where Rojas convened with Don Fidel

    The Castro of books and movies, mammoth chapters and world history.

    Did Gonzalo know Che? ? El Che?

    

    Who knows? Who knows whose visage they place on their youthful (and ignorant) t-shirts

    Who can tell me how wrong the works and legacies of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the savages

    of the left would maim and stultify our earth? Our human family, partially destroyed.

    Capitalists are not perfect, none of us have been.

    And Jesus, I submit, was a carpenter and a cleric, not a capitalist or entrepeneur.

    He had bigger fish to fry, and grander fish to catch, and assist.

    Jesus was greater than all the wealthiest and most dreadfully powerful men and women.

    He was the best among them all, with little money or care for it.

    Yet He rendered what He rendered, and we love Him for it.

    My professor Gonzalo was not a believer, no creo. No un creyente de Dios, me imagino

    But nevertheless, or sin embargo, Don Gonzalo contained all the nicest parts of human and God.

    Knowledgable, wise, kind and just to his degree, like a king.

    He was there, and I imbibed, and perhaps lapped in some sense.

    Or wonder, or mystery. Or even a sense of art and beauty!

    I could only hope.

    Ojala'

    I could only hope, all these years later.

    That I can be here and there.

    Gracias, mi profesor.

    Muchas gracias por compartir.

    Y, como canto' la chilena Violeta Parra,

    Gracias a la vida.

    Gracias por sus clases.

Crying and Weeping, and a Little Gnashing of Teeth!

    First off, Artificial Intelligence: It does not always find my blog, which is a bit distressing. But with some help it finds me, sums up things about what I write, and it also finds my LinkedIn account. Where I share my blog. The AI is from Bill Gates/ Micrososoft Word. Or is it Jeff Bezos's Amazon? Whatever we call that. Google is neither, it is... Bezos? No, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Okay. All those guys.

    I mix up Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, which may be like mixing up Coke, Pepsi, and Doctor Pepper. Or China, Russia, and Iran. How dumb is that? Huge corporations that surround our lives, colas that tempt us once and again, or countries that threaten the US of A. Analyze that, purveyors of idiomatic expressions. We do this in some fields...

    I looked up "miasma" in my blog yesterday because of an author Dave Pruden, his book entitled "Miasma of Deceit." The word popped up in my blog about seven times. I referred to Communism as a political miasma in my post about Crying for Mom, Part 1, in Chile. I plugged it into my word processor in order to find it. Dave's new book is call the The Ferryman Wait. Right? He gave it to my wife. About his son surviving a bad car wreck and his sister dying of leukemia. We talked about Wyoming and places on the back deck Under the canopy. Then I had to take pictures and make calls.

    About crying: yes, there is plenty of that.

    My wife has, because she gets emotional, which is sensible, being with me and with our kids and her life plans. Our daughter has her young boyfriend who is diagnosed with serious brain cancer, and he may not have a great guarantee for long life. This has made us cry, like yesterday.

    I cried a couple Sundays ago reading out loud from the Poisonwood Bible. Ruth May, a little four year-old, bit by a green mamba. A death beast of efficiency. Yikes. It resonated with me losing a little sibling, a little girl, which is not the same, but the tears came effulgently. I choked up and kept reading. my wife had patience and pity for me. Mercy.

    Ach! Indian Town Gap. A few stories from there... A place not entirely for me. Shogun was my best accomplishment there, perhaps.

    What other tears? My nieces in two states, having hard, hard times. One is going through rehab, for alcohol, and the other was starved and perhaps overdosed.

    Wow, worth crying about.

    What else?

    My poor daughter has her boyfriend in this relatively awful state. But I stated that I will joke and be funny, and not NOT take it seriously, but to celebrate good moments.

    It is not all tears and gnashing of teeth. 

    We can move and act, think and pray.

    Today is P-day.

Financial Security and Prosperity - Can We All Make It?

    There are the mega rich, which it seems there have always been. Kings, magnates, wealthy landowners and military rulers, of means, have always have huge sums of money and vast wealth. They are the minority, but they exist. Meanwhile, the poor and destitute exist in abundance.

    Not quite fair, right? Normal, but not inherently fair. Not when my former next door neighbor dies unnecessarily because she had to wait a few more days for the insured medicine to arrive, instead of getting it on time. She died because of insurance and cost, not based on the need for the medicine itself.

    This is a middle class neighborhood in the United States of America, in the 2010s.

    That should not be. An avoidable death to prices and policies, not the needs of the health of the person.

    Not cool.

    Bernie Sanders has his answers, so does Elon Musk and Donald Trump. We have a million people in between, and most or many of us cannot decide what are the best courses of action, so we have elections and push bills and assert and collect taxes.

    What are the answers?

    Not everyone can travel as they wish. Some go as they please, the rest as we can. Some barely do leisure trips at all.

    Some cannot afford food or rent, let alone medicine.

    Marx was not right, not his buddy Engels.

    Who else? Friedman, of the University of Chicago? The Milton school of Economics?

    How to make things fair.

    Not sure, but I wanted to my son, who is bright, to work on it. 

 I Cannot Be Everything to You - But You Can Have it All

    You can have it all

   

    I cannot be all of it, nor should I be.

    I can do my part. Or try.

    Jesus can be everything, or most things that you need.

    But if you do not believe in Him, there are others that will inspire and uplift.

    You can find them, or Him, or the great spirit of knowledge and vastness of the universe.

    What gives you peace.

    All of it.

    We, us mortals, are finite, and limited, despite our eternal souls.

    Contradictory and paradoxical,

    Us mysterious enigmas.

    I will try to love and support and sustain you.

    I thank you for trying, loving me and not giving up or giving in.

    See you soon.

    Sweet dreams.

    We could be in Egypt...  or elsewhere...