George Orwell, E.B. White, and Chuck Jones aside, pigs do not speak English.
Well, pigs didn’t speak English before the 1930s, apparently, when use of the word oink was first recorded. Other animals seem to be much more literate. Cows have been mooing and cats have been meowing for many centuries, since at least the 1500s and the 1600s, respectively, in English. Cows and cats are, in fact, multilingual, as they’ve been mooing and meowing (cows and cats—don’t confuse the order) in other languages for thousands of years. And dogs?—they’ve been bow-wowing in English since the 1500s, as well. In fact, they were quite literate in doing so, as Shakespeare himself quotes them in The Tempest: “Harke, harke, bowgh wawgh: the watch-Dogges barke.”
But the pigs have been slow to pick up their own English words. I’ve asked why, but they respond with the recent acronym OINK (honest! I read it on the Internet!), which stands for “Oh I've No Komment,” proving that pigs can’t spell English, either.
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Bill Brohaugh