Overnight News: If you’re looking for some privilege to leverage, arrange to be born a native speaker of English.

Even now, tho’ we are not the America that was, it is the very luckiest of fates to have been born here. We wax and wane as pretend friends of liberty, but it remains that someone like me is unpersecuted, at least so far, which would be true in no other country on the planet, not for all of human history.

But an even better privilege than being born an American is to be born – anywhere – to English-speaking parents. Chaucer’s tongue is not just the actual lingua franca of our frantic planet, it has linguistic carte blanche everywhere.

There was a time when French truly was a contender as the international language, as was Latin before that. But English eats everything. It feasted upon Latin at six different gorgings, and it absorbs by rapine serendipity everything it desires from every other language.

Our grammar is easy, compared to Latin, and our nouns and adjectives are all very-memorably genderless. But we have more irregular verbs than other languages have verbs altogether, and our spelling rules are apparently contrived solely to frustrate. To learn English as a baby is to blow raspberries in garbled Shakespeare. To learn it as an adult – to encapsulate all the Earth within the moon that is any other language – is functionally impossible.

True fluency in English-as-a-second-language is a genius tell, but even then smoothly-flowing discursive prose is out of reach for all but the Joseph Conrads of this polyglot world: If you were not born swimming in these waters, they will always seem acrid and cold to you. That would be “systemic linguisticism” – the imposter syndrome that becomes ever-more-obvious the more you try to explain it.

Yes, I am smug, but I am right to be smug: I was born awash in the world’s richest currency: English, the language of much of the best of humanity’s past – and of all of its future.

If you really want to see the world for all that it is, take the time to shop around for English-speaking parents. The privilege they will grant you, just by babbling at you in your babyhood, is virtually-unobtainable by any other means.

In other news:

Q13-TV Fox Seattle: Seattle police arrest 53 shoplifters in a single day during citywide theft operation. “First you have to turn around” – so any movement in the opposite direction is a good thing.

The Western Journal: Food Prices Soar Under Biden as Industry Leader Issues Dire Warning: There’s Still More to Come.

FEE.org: 15 States Are Moving to Curb Public Health Agency Powers Following Lockdown Carnage.

Revolver: How An Army of Pissed-Off Moms Are Single-Handedly Destroying The Left’s Marxist Plot.

American Greatness: Enjoy Your Gruel: Understanding the Deliberate Agenda of Our Ruling Class.