In August 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt decided American spelling needed fixing. He ordered the Government Printing Office to use about 300 simplified spellings in executive-branch publications. The list came from the Simplified Spelling Board, a group of scholars and reformers who thought English spelling was needlessly hard. Americans had already traded honour for honor, plough for plow, and programme for program.
Why stop there?
His August 27 letter to Public Printer Charles A. Stillings, preserved in the Library of Congress, called the change modest. If the public liked the new spellings, they would stick. If not, they would be dropped, or as Roosevelt preferred to write it, dropt, “and that is all there is about it.”1
Congress objected, and the newspapers had a field day. By December, Roosevelt had given up on requiring federal printers to use the new spellings. A president could tell government printers how to spell, but he could not tell a nation. The language belonged to the people who used it, and they saw no reason to follow.
So if no president owns the language, who keeps it working?
What my grandparents understood
Roosevelt’s experiment landed in the middle of one of the largest immigration waves in American history. Between the late 1800s and World War I, millions arrived from Europe, bringing Italian, German, Polish, Yiddish, and dozens of other languages. The census began measuring English ability in 1890, and in 1900 it asked everyone ten and older whether they could speak English. Later surveys added questions about mother tongue and the language spoken at home.2 3
My grandparents and their family came a little later, from Europe via South America in the late 1920s, and they learned English as a second language. At home they spoke both. At work they spoke English, because that is where the work was. They became contractors, builders, employees, and entrepreneurs—and every one of those roles ran on English. A builder has to read the plans, price the job, and settle the contract in words the customer understands.
As a child, I listened to them speak their native tongue and recognized only one word: my name.
They kept their heritage and gained a country. The language of home tied them to family and faith. English tied them to customers, crews, neighbors, and fellow citizens. That is the quiet strength of a common language: it lets people with no shared ancestry share a civic life.
What the numbers tell us
American English has barely changed since 1900; a 1926 newspaper still reads easily. The largest measured change is in how many of us speak another language at home: about 23.1 million people aged five and older in 1980, and 67.8 million by 2019. Over the same years, the number who spoke only English at home grew from about 187.2 million to 241 million. In 2019, that was about 78 percent of Americans, and Spanish accounted for about 62 percent of those who spoke another language.4 5
Those figures need careful reading. Speaking another language at home does not mean a person can’t speak English; many Americans are bilingual, and the census measures English ability separately. A March 2025 article in The Federalist contrasted the fast shift among descendants of earlier European immigrants with patterns among more recent arrivals.6
My grandparents’ test was simple. Does each person have enough command of the shared language to take full part where they live? That command lets a patient understand a doctor, an owner negotiate a contract, and a citizen question an elected official. It turns a resident into a contributor.
That raises a harder question, and I would rather ask it than ignore it. Over two centuries, Americans built a distinct way of life, with habits, expectations, and civic customs carried in a common language. When newcomers learn that language, they gain the full run of the country, and the country gains what they bring. When a community can live and work without it, both sides lose. The newcomer’s opportunities shrink to the size of the neighborhood, and the country loses some of the common ground that lets neighbors trade, argue, and settle their differences.
Whether the last forty years have left us better or worse off deserves an honest debate, with the census numbers on the table.
When schools and washington changed the rules
For most of the twentieth century, public schools were expected to teach immigrant children English, and quickly. The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 funded programs for students with limited English proficiency without requiring a single approach. Policy reviews from The Heritage Foundation trace a longer shift, from schools as engines of civic assimilation toward more weight on home language and cultural identity.7 8 9 A child should not have to give up a family language to reach American opportunity, and no child should leave school without the English needed to pursue it.
Washington shifted too. In 2000, President Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 13166 directed federal agencies to expand access for people with limited English.10 In March 2025, President Donald Trump designated English the official language of the United States and revoked that order, while leaving agencies free to offer other languages.11 12
For more than two centuries, English was the government’s common language by custom. Now it is official.
Americans disagree about whether that designation was necessary. But most people who choose to make America their home presumably want to become part of its national life. Belonging requires more than living within the same borders. A people must understand one another well enough to govern themselves, and a shared language has long helped make that possible.
One language, different meanings
A newer strain comes from inside the language itself: vocabularies so specialized they stop communicating. In August 2025, The Daily Caller reported that the center-left group Third Way urged Democrats to drop terms such as birthing person, cisgender, heteronormative, and microaggression when talking with ordinary voters.13 The question was never whether those words had definitions. It was whether ordinary listeners used them or understood them at all.
Every field builds its own vocabulary. Among people who share the training, it adds precision. Aimed at everyone else, it builds a wall, and the people on the far side tune out or nod along without understanding. I saw that wall from the inside. Early in my career as a management consultant, our client sites changed often, but the work stayed the same. Our vocabulary served us well, but it often meant something else to our clients. When a partner told a client, “We’re expediting our report,” the client heard faster service. We staff consultants heard something different: the billable hours no longer justified the partner’s time, and senior managers took over oversight. Same words, two meanings, and only one side of the table knew it.
Shorthand or steering?
Any specialized word raises a simple question: what is it for? Some terms are coined to name something precisely. Others arrive to change how people see an issue before they have time to think it through. What separates a consultant’s shorthand from language built to persuade a public is the motive. Who benefits from the confusion? Working vocabulary exists to get a job done among people who already share it. When it fails to reach an outsider, the failure is accidental, and the fix is to translate.
Language designed to shift a culture runs on a different incentive: it works best when the listener does not stop to ask what it means. One kind of language restricts, while the other trusts the listener. One controls, while the other adds to understanding. One condemns and punishes, while the other inspires and encourages.
Working vocabulary is a tool you can sharpen. Language built to steer a culture is something to see through, and that is next week’s subject. Until then, carry one question to every unfamiliar word, including your own: who gains if the listener understands it, and who gains if they don’t?
Put it to work: the plain-language test
My grandparents translated their knowledge into plain language every workday. Many experienced professionals rarely do, and it may be costing them. If you want your expertise to win clients, train successors, or outlast your career, you must make it understandable to someone who doesn’t share your experience. Before your next proposal or contract, ask yourself what sets you apart—and whether a client could explain it back to you. The following five steps take an afternoon.
Explain what sets you apart without industry jargon. In three sentences, describe what you do, who you serve, and what changes for them. Clients buy results they can understand and picture.
List the terms your work depends on. Include words you use with colleagues without a second thought. You’ll likely find several in your first draft.
Translate each term into plain language. Use no more than two sentences someone new to your field could understand. If you struggle, you’ve found expertise you haven’t yet learned to explain. That knowledge may be your greatest competitive advantage. For example, a consultant’s “scope creep” becomes “when a project grows beyond what the client agreed to pay for, one small request at a time.”
Test your explanations with two readers. First, give an AI tool your three sentences and definitions. Ask: “Read this as a potential client unfamiliar with my field. Flag anything unclear, any jargon, and anything a competitor could claim.” Revise the language yourself. Then share it with someone who knows your work, preferably a client. Wherever they hesitate, clarify.
Put the plain version to work. Use it in your next proposal or client document. Keep the definitions as a working glossary, and give them to someone you’re training. Ask them to explain a term back to you.
When you finish, you will have the start of something most experts never build: a plain-language record of what they know. That record is how experience passes from one person to the next, and I return to it often in the Work, Value & Independence articles at Line of Ascent. If you try the test, reply and tell me which word was hardest to translate.
The final word belongs to us
American English endured a century of immigration, war, and technological change because ordinary people continued using it to work, trade, and settle their differences. Roosevelt couldn’t change it by order, and no institution can preserve our shared understanding for us.
A common language is more than a collection of words. It is how a free people reason together, resolve disagreements, and govern themselves. Keeping it that way is our responsibility.
Next week: What happens when we use the same words but mean different things? And how do we recognize when a headline promises one thing but delivers another?
If you know someone whose expertise gets lost in industry jargon, forward this article to them. If someone forwarded it to you, get one free article a week at lineofascent.com.