Most English speakers today learned it as a second language, so how will their habits, struggles, and primary languages change the English language? Prospero says it has already gotten simpler. It may continue down that path.

“For example, European Union bureaucrats are likely to use the English ‘control’ to mean ‘monitor’ or ‘verify’, because contrôler and kontrollieren have this meaning in French and German….

“What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on? An easy choice seems to be ‘whom’. English was once heavily inflected; all nouns carried a suffix showing whether they were subjects, direct objects, indirect objects or played some other role in a sentence. Today, only the pronouns are inflected. And while any competent speaker can use I, me, my and mine correctly, even the most fluent can find whom (the object form of who) slippery. So whom might disappear completely, or perhaps only survive as a stylistic option in formal writing.”

The Starz network is developing Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for the small screen, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The series was passed over earlier by HBO.

Gaiman is excited about it. He says, “The team at Starz has been quite certain that they wanted to give Shadow, Wednesday and Laura a home since they first heard that the book was out there. I can’t wait to see what they do to bring the story to the widest possible audience able to cope with it.”

I gather he anticipates haters.

“It is a loser’s game to try to appease the claims of those who despise one’s moral convictions, but nonetheless complain you aren’t applying them fastidiously enough.”

Here’s a quote from a friend on recent news. I wanted to say this yesterday, but didn’t give it enough thought.