A legend of uncertain provenance has it that Winston Churchill, addressing a French audience about lessons learned from looking back on his own past, inadvertently raised a laugh: “Quand je regarde mon derrière, je vois qu’il est divisé en deux parties égales.” Most Anglos know enough French to get the joke. But alas, our knowledge doesn’t go much further than Churchill’s own. Whatever languages we may have learned at school—
French and German in my case (as well as classical Greek and Latin) we may be able to read a bit, but our spoken language performance should mantle us in shame.