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I want to thank @redsummer for posting this fascinating article. Despite its flaws, Hacker News is one of the best things going on the Internet right now, especially for retired folks like me who have the time to wade through the new stuff and find the occasional gem.

My takeaway is that globalization has winners and losers. The winners get to keep the spoils and write the history books. The losers are debased and then ignored.

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It really was a great read. Most importantly to me, I got a lot of insight into American society by reading a bit about French society and politics.

It's things like this that make me wish I knew another language so I could peer across that barrier and into another microcosm more often.

I am a bit late to reply, but languages are changing also. The average written French in media is now much poorer in vocabulary than it was before 1995, and there now are many grammar mistakes. The language evolves continuously.

And the spoken French has incredibly changed in the last decades. Most young people would have problem to understand the spoken French of 1900.

That said, French (like English in GB, or German) spread a lot thanks to TV in the 50'/60'. When I was young there was still old people speaking the local language of their tiny part of Brittany.

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