At 9:35 AM 3/30/96, Dr. Dimitri Vulis is rumored to have typed: [...]

No, I think both of Tim's statements illustrate the typical Americans disdain for learning for knowledge's sake and the (still amazing to me) ability to express pride in their ignorance. [...] It's as if though their challenge is to go through life learning as little as they can get away with (other than obscure sports statistics).

Well, I believe that Tim's original point was that Americans have little to gain in practical terms from learning foreign languages, while others are forced by necessity to learn English (and possibly other languages.) So far no one has provided any convincing counter-argument to this point. As an American who has learned a great many languages just for the sake of knowing them I can assure you that this knowledge has turned out to have no practical benefit to me in my daily life. I can converse in French, German, Italian, Indonesian/Malay, and can "get around" in Tamil, Dutch, Russian, and Arabic. I can read Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphics (okay, so I was on a dead languages kick in college, sue me...) and know enough in eight or nine other languages to travel anywhere in the world and be secure in the knowledge that I could order dinner, read a train schedule, and find shelter. Big deal. This knowledge is still of no practical benefit to me; it does not help me do my job any better, it does not make my life significantly better than Americans who are not polyglots, and in the past year the only time I have had occasion to really use my linguistic abilities was when I was able to deliver a particularly nasty reminder that some Americans do speak more than just English to a pair of obnoxious French ladies in the Los Altos Starbuck's coffee shop who seemed to think that if the natives cannot understand you then you have permission to make rude comments about them loudly and in public... For this ability I spent eight years in class learning when to use the past subjunctive form of etre?!? BTW, those who learn as little as they can get away with may not fit into your ivory tower definition of true knowledge, but they are doing the important thing: "getting away with it." Every time I hear someone whine about knowledge for its own sake I get the fealing they are just jealous because they wasted time learning more knowledge than was necessary for the task at hand... :) jim