I love you, English language.

There, I said it. 

O English language, so often have I heard you denounced by your native speakers.

“It’s such a mess!” I’ve heard more than a few accuse of you, despairingly.

“It makes no sense!”

“It’s so inconsistent!”

“Too many rules, too many exceptions!”

Nearly as often have I heard English speakers, upon learning a secondary language, extol the virtues of their newly adopted tongue, remarking upon its mellifluence, logic, expressiveness, civility. So much better than that dreadful, confused, broken hodgepodge-mishmash of a language, English — often the silent implication.

And thus I’ve come to believe I may perhaps be in a minority. I’ve been a coward, I know. Please forgive me that it’s taken this long to confess. I’m not afraid now to say:

I’m in love with you, English language.

I love you in all your imperfections, in all your foibles and your aberrations.

You’re a language with a chequered past and some might try to shame you for that, but I love you with all your quirky spellings and their intriguing, splintered histories.

I hate to come off like a size queen, but I am impressed that your vocabulary is the largest in the world by far. And it doesn’t hurt that you’re so flexible.

I adore your adaptability, and I’m inspired by the way you embrace change and evolve. I’m charmed by your pickpocketed gems from other languages. It’s a habit that you just can’t break, and I think it’s kind of sexy.

I’m smitten by the depth of your ambiguities and nuances. I’m even fond of your dumb puns. I swoon at your streetwise slang. I’m obsessed with your auto-antonyms, onomatopeias, portmanteaus, malapropisms. You give me a thousand and one ways to express a single thought.

You may be out of fashion, English, but I don’t care. There’s no other language like you, and I love you.