English wasn’t a global lingua franca in 1943, and it didn’t seem likely to become one anytime soon. It had a daunting vocabulary, with its largest dictionaries containing some half a million words. Its spelling was a cruel farce. Even Albert Einstein had been brought to his knees by what he called English’s “underhanded orthography.” Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say,
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