The Esperanto Plot

To see my reply, follow the link to the Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post has a limit of 250 words on comments, and so I had to trim my comment to get it to fit.

Below is my full comment that I would have posted.

Regards,
Mike Jones

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This article that mentions Esperanto is an item of satire.

Now, the underlying technique of satire is to take the natural logarithm of everything. When you do that, you get greatly reduced values, even negative values where there were only positive values to start with, and therein lies the humor/bite of satire. To get the true picture, all you have to do is take the natural exponential (i.e., the inverse of the natural logarithm) of everything. The article cited a world population of Esperantists of 12. Well, the natural exponential of 12 (that is, e to the 12th power) is about 163 thousand, which seems to me like an accurate estimate of the number of people in the world having at least a barely passable ability to speak the language. The “2 million” figure, cited by someone else in response to the article, which is a figure I’ve seen touted from time to time in the past, is one I simply cannot believe (much as I would like to). The “2 million” figure is what you get if you count every living person who ever held an Esperanto book in their hands for more than ten seconds without dropping it like a hot potato:)

For what it’s worth, the article contains three typos: “or a pastrami sandwich” should be “on a pastrami sandwich”, “training in neologism” should be “training in neologisms” or “training in neologism-creation”, and “the movie” should be “the Movie”. Hopefully, someday we will be offered in the theaters, “Proofreading: the Movie”.

As far as how I found this article, it wasn’t hard to do. Such wholesale cremation of the truth gives rise to a plume of smoke so thick and so high that it can be seen from hundreds of miles away. No one in that area can believably claim not to have known what was going on, and within that area there will be at least one Esperantist who will post a warning about it on an Esperanto social website, of which yours truly is a member.

The rest is history.