How Do You Spell 🏆

Nov 1, 2026

JD Vance Tells Hospitals to Speak English. The Language Doesn't Care What He Thinks.

There is something almost medieval about a politician standing up and telling sick people to learn the local tongue before they bleed out. JD Vance did exactly that, floating the idea that hospitals should just... expect English, as if language acquisition is something a frightened Guatemalan grandmother can knock out between the ER intake form and the IV drip. I once sat in a Chicago clinic waiting room and watched a Somali family try to explain chest pain to a nurse using hand gestures and a phone translator app that kept buffering. The nurse was patient. The app was not. Nobody in that room was thinking about national identity. English is not in danger. It is the most aggressively spread language on the planet, a colonial freight train that rolled over hundreds of tongues and kept moving. The idea that hospitals offering translation services somehow weakens it is the kind of logic that sounds tough in a speech and falls apart the second you press on it. Language policy made by people who only speak one language, administered to people who speak four, enforced inside buildings where the whole point is to keep humans alive — that is a sentence that deserves to sit with you for a minute before anyone

Oct 31, 2026

The ESV Bible Turns 25 and the English Language Owes It a Complicated Debt

Twenty-five years of one Bible translation surviving in a market that chews up sacred texts and spits out revised editions every decade. That is not nothing. The English Standard Version has embedded itself into American Protestant life so thoroughly that its particular rhythms — its slightly formal cadences, its preference for word-for-word fidelity over loose paraphrase — have started shaping how a whole subculture actually speaks and writes about faith. I remember sitting in a church in Nashville sometime around 2009 and noticing how the preacher's own spontaneous sentences started bending toward the translation he'd been reading all week. Language does that. It gets inside you. The ESV made a specific bet on English — that readers wanted something closer to the original Hebrew and Greek grain, even if the sentences came out a little stiff, a little formal, a little unlike anything you'd say ordering coffee. That bet paid off commercially and culturally in ways nobody fully predicted. Rival translations kept loosening the language, chasing accessibility, and the ESV went the other direction entirely, doubling down on a kind of disciplined antique dignity. And now here we are, a quarter century in, watching its particular brand of English settle into the bones of millions of readers who never once stopped to wonder how a translation's word choices were quietly