Now that voters in Arizona, Colorado and Florida have voted to make English the official language of their states, I wonder how far they`re going to take it.
''mouse mouth'' in Spanish. I don`t think the townspeople there would like having to change their mailing addresses to ''Mouse Mouth, Fla.'' That wouldn`t do much for their property values.
And what about the name of their state? Florida means ''full of flowers'' in Spanish. That could get pretty cumbersome on envelopes, too.
What about the other states? How about Casa Grande, Ariz.? How about those great Colorado spots La Junta, Buena Vista, Del Norte, Monte Vista? Are all to be sanitized into common English?
Is Colorado to be relabeled simply ''Red''? Egad.
If this sounds a bit goofy to you, the official-English movement sounds goofy to me.
For one thing, English already is our national language. We don`t need to declare it to be our official language by statute or constitutional amendment any more than we need to declare oxygen to be our national gas.
Yet the movement to declare it by laws sputters along, state by state, with its leaders hoping for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Arizona, Colorado and Florida bring to 17 the number of states, including Illinois, that have declared English to be their official language. Texas may be next and more probably will follow.
Big deal. Official-English propositions pass by overwhelming numbers (83 percent in Florida) because they look good on the ballot, even if they don`t do anything.
Although most of the people who voted for these measures may have been well-intentioned, the perfume of good intentions fails to hide the foul odor of mean-spiritedness.
There are better ways to deal with the debate over bilingual education and other bilingual services than by passing official-English laws.
More precisely, the huge majorities English-only measures win from voters are driven as much by the resentment many of my fellow ''Anglos'' feel when they hear foreign tongues chattering away on streets or in elevators or see multilingual signs in buses, polling places or public buildings.
Former California Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, a linguist by trade and high priest of language snobbery, founded Washington-based U.S. English, of which he is honorary chairman, after he failed to get an official-English amendment added to the Constitution. He doesn`t like bilingual signs, education programs or ballots, and he has had little trouble finding allies.
''Rather than insisting that it is the immigrant`s duty to learn the language of this country, government has instead acted as if it has a duty to permanently accommodate an immigrant in his native language,'' he recently wrote.
It didn`t happen with Europeans or Caribbeans or Asians and it is not going to happen with Hispanics, the language group this effort seems most concerned about.
Contrary to popular myth, most immigrants, Hispanic and otherwise, want to learn English. Linguistic minorities everywhere else in the world try their best to learn the dominant language or languages in their country, especially if they want to advance economically or socially.
We in the United States don`t hold a monopoly on language snobbery, but no one works at it as vigorously as we do.
We are not content with being the only modern industrial country in which a person can be considered well educated without knowing a foreign language. We have gone on to actively encourage this condition by passing measures that appear, at least, to be aimed at penalizing those who speak foreign tongues.
And make no mistake: We pay a terrible price for our xenophobia. Our government has plenty of people to catch spies, but woefully few who can talk to them in their native tongues. Our major corporations are just as short on executives who can understand the languages and cultures of our overseas trading partners as well as they understand ours. And we wonder why there`s a trade deficit.
Still, while we order tacos or burritos or pasta or cafe au lait from a menu after shouting ''Bravo!'' at the finale of a matinee at the cinema, we gripe about how those darn foreigners are invading our linguistic culture.
C`est la vie. Sorry, language snobs. I mean, that`s life.