Old Joke

I put in that bit about Esperanto to push Stupy's buttons, too.  It's guaranteed to happen.  But also to make the point I did about the need of an easily learned, so possibly democratic lingua franca, something we don't have and which no unplanned language can be.

It's hilarious that someone who speaks only English and can't manage to think in that one is mocking someone for having another language.  

A person who speaks three languages is a polyglot.  A person who speaks two languages is bi-lingual.  A person who speaks one language is an American, as the old joke goes. 

And Stupy doesn't think in even one.   Esperanto is a language that a person of normal intelligence can learn to speak in a few months of fairly modest effort with greater fluency than they're likely to achieve in years of study with a "natural" language.  But that's someone of normal intelligence.  Stupy is definitely sub-normal.  Maybe I'll really annoy him and post daily lessons. 

Update:  Oh, what Stupy said wasn't meaningful, it was a repetition of a common-received snark which is meaningless, the kind of thing that you read and hear from mid-to-low brows who want to make a show of being in what they mistake as "the know".  But it's as meaningless as what's likely to come out of the mouth of some of the dimmer Republicans in congress.All they show is that they're college-credentialed later day Babbitts.   Interesting fact, George Soros' father Teodoro, was an eminent Esperantist.  He adopted the name "Soros" which means "will soar."   I believe he wrote Maskerado ĉirkaŭ la morto the account of how he kept his family from being murdered by the Nazis in E-o. 

It's a shame that I can't quote the late Claude Piron, a man who worked a number of years as a live interpreter at the UN, and so knew what he was talking about better than easily 99 44/100th percent of those who snark about Esperanto.  He wrote an excellent study of the potential of Esperanto,  La Bona Lingvo - I especially liked the section where he talked about how people are allowed to come up with on the fly neologism giving examples he'd collected over several decades.  You're allowed to invent any neologism with any word root that works, it's remarkably effective.  I read that and his excellent Le défi des langues - Du gâchis au bon sens. in which he went into the pathology of those who had an emotional problem with the idea of Esperanto.  It was originally in French - his native language - and concentrated heavily on the phenomenon among the French but most of what he said is applicable to English speaking idiots like Stupy.  He is famous for being able to write entire books in Esperanto with a limited vocabulary, some of them on quite complex topics.  It's one of the reasons I can confidently say that using E-o as a universal language to translate even complex texts would work.