Linguistic privilege

I grew up bilingual, through no fault of my own. As soon as I started speaking Romanian, I was also learning English. It means my life so far has been rich and multidimensional in a way that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. But it also means I’ll never stop hearing, “No way you’re Romanian! Your English is so good!”.

But do you know who never has to deal with this? Who has never had to reply politely to what is clearly a backhanded compliment? Oh, all the men in the Epstein emails.

Ever since the last document dump hit the news, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this. Not just the horrifying details and connections (though they are plenty upsetting on their own), but how the majority of emails appear to have been written not in English, but in spite of it. How the senders and recipients exist in a world of privilege so rarefied the rules of grammar no longer apply.

And, look, I’m not salty. I don’t wish I could be exempt from correct language use and being multilingual is like living several different lives at once. Your experiences, thoughts, and emotions run along parallel tracks defined by different vocabularies, different linguistic selves. It’s wonderful and I count myself lucky to have this.

I actually wrote a whole blog about the multilingual experience last year.

The Language I Live In: How Linguistic Habits Can Make or Break Your Conversations

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May 21, 2025

Linguistic habits encompass choice of words and topics, tone, and sentence structure aka the way you are when you speak. But in this post, I’d like to extend the term to how multilingual people often have very different kinds of conversations depending on what language they’re speaking—and I think this is more than just code-switching.

My parents did their best to encourage a bilingual upbringing because they understood the doors it could open. This was a few years after the fall of the USSR and Western optimism was booming. People could legally own businesses, blue jeans, and Coke, listen to previously-banned music, even watch MTV if they had cable.

Under the dictatorship, English had been hard to come by in schools, side-eyed by the state. If you were into anything vaguely Western, you became a target for the Secret Police. And even if you weren’t, as it later turned out when old files were unsealed and people found out their own friends, neighbours, even spouses had been spying on them for the regime. But that’s a story for another time.

In the 90s, it was finally ok to learn English. More than ok, it was your ticket out of Romania. People we knew were brushing up on their language skills so they could emigrate to Canada, the US, anywhere West of Berlin.

Coming out from the brutal isolation of a dictatorship, most Romanians understood linguistic privilege better than anyone else. If you knew English, you were going places. Hell, if you could read and write correctly you were a cut above the rest.

As a post-dictatorship class system emerged, university graduates and “intellectual”-type job holders scrambled for the top rungs. And one of the few ways they could stand out in a country so recently flattened by populist authoritarianism was good grammar.

Try explaining to these people that the truly wealthy now write like the worst student in their second-grade class. The one who ate his own boogers off the end of a pencil; the one who skipped school some days so his siblings could use the one pair of shoes they all shared.

The kid who, when he grew up, would be laughed out of opportunities because he couldn’t perform correct grammar.

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There are so many articles, think pieces, research papers, and listicles on how not to write emails like a woman, but none on grammar etiquette for rich perverts. So many tips on the right number of exclamation marks (you want to be taken seriously, right?), avoiding hedging language or sounding professional but not bitchy—and none about writing legible emails to your sex-traffic buddies.

When you float above traditional structures of class and power, good grammar becomes optional. It’s a suggestion, like taking off your shoes at the door or not smoking inside. Why not. You can so you will.

Epstein and pals don’t need to overcompensate for their age, sex, inexperience, class or immigration status by writing competently. They’re already the default humans (male), in charge of more wealth than my home country of Romania knows what to do with. Grammar is for plebs. They’ve ascended to the upper tiers of existence: international child abuse and garbled English.

The rest of us law-abiding chumps have to mind our grammar. Not necessarily because of what we stand to gain from it, but what we could lose if we don’t demonstrate, in the right contexts, a good and correct grasp of English.

English because, in the world I’m familiar with, and the one in which Epstein & co. moved, it is the de-facto universal language. At least until the Esperanto nerds finally get their act together.

And I said demonstrate because grammar is a performance. It’s not like English fell out of the sky, fully formed and accompanied by a massive workbook that made a hole in the ozone layer on its way down. Grammar as we know it today is the result of endless borrowing, cross-pollination, and negotiation about how to use the language so it’s more or less understood by everyone.

By writing and speaking a certain way, by using (or not) the right punctuation, vocabulary, syntax, intonation in a given context (workplace email or drunk-texting your friend) you are performing language. How well you perform it can make the difference between getting that job/promotion/contract/date/medical appointment etc you need and getting screwed over.

Many people in vulnerable or marginalised positions will do their best to perform language correctly because there are serious consequences otherwise. If you’re an immigrant trying to build a career in London, you better re-re-read your work emails before hitting send. Don’t be sloppy, double-check your plurals, contractions, and punctuation, and for fuck’s sake don’t misspell your name.

That goes double if you’re a copywriter, like I used to be, and your surname is absolutely illegible outside your home country. (I sometimes wonder about the opportunities I missed because the person reviewing job applications took one look at my surname and put my CV in the reject pile.)

If you’re at all in a position to be taken unseriously, you don’t want to increase your chances by writing like a dummy. The penalties for bad grammar result from a cascade of assumptions about what performing language incorrectly says about a person, their social, economic, and moral value.

I mentioned earlier that it’s a backhanded compliment whenever someone tells me my English is good. It’s because there are several layers of assumptions nestled here, like a juicy, racist, xenophobic onion.

First off, my English isn’t that good. It’s not better than that of any other native speaker (and I have a bone to pick with that phrase, too, but one thing at a time). It’s only better than the English a fictional Romanian person should speak, in the limited imagination of the commenter.

That’s because of the second layer of assumptions, which is that, being from a non-English speaking country, you should somehow use the language imperfectly. That you should mess up verb tenses or apostrophe placement or at the very least drop your articles like a Russian villain in a Marvel movie. If you took English in school, it probably wasn’t very good. You should at least have a weird accent, right?

Because, assumption number three, wherever you come from can’t be that great—with functioning public education and a naturally multilingual population—if you’re in my country instead, speaking my language. That one hits like a ton of racist bricks.

Or assumption number three is full-on that wherever I’m from is some shithole where the barely-literate natives circle-dance in the street, Borat style, perhaps in between fucking our cousins.

(This is a true story from my time studying at a prestigious university in the UK. I stayed in student accommodation and was the first Romanian immigrant many of my housemates had ever met. I heard a lot of, “but your English is so good!”.

They also liked to ask if I had buses, washing machines, and other such amenities back home. My advisor asked if we got email over there.

The kicker came one day when I was packing away my Tesco groceries in the shared kitchen. As I struggled with the bags, a girl casually asked if we had those back in Romania. “What, bags?”, I asked back.

“Yeah, shopping bags.” She stirred her tea.

“No, we just carry everything in our hats.”)

But back to linguistic privilege, or, as I like to call it, too much of a good thing. There are certain rich and powerful sickos who can stop performing grammar without consequence, like Epstein and his friends sending party invites that look written by the Cookie Monster.

“Dec come visit Caribbean”

- from an email sent to Peter Thiel

It signals you can’t be bothered with the ordinary rules of pleasant and efficient communication. You know of them, but they’re not for you.

It’s like this anecdote I once read and wish I could unread about Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad, the media mogul Robert Maxwell. He was a bully, prone to rage, susceptible to flattery, and fond of below-the-belt (pun intended) intimidation manoeuvres. Apparently, he was known for holding meetings from his office toilet with the door open. When British journalist Jenni Frazer tried to interview him in 1986, she was made to wait while he put on a particularly loud and disgusting-sounding show, as a power play to make her uncomfortable.

Am I trying to say these semi-illiterate billionaires using English at a second-grade level are shitting on the language? Yeah, pretty much. And they can get away with it, too.

Bathroom privilege, decorum privilege, linguistic privilege—it all boils down to the same divide between those of us who can flaunt the rules and those who risk everything whenever we overstep even a little.

1. You might also enjoy this insightful take on bad grammar as privilege from a Bearblog user.

2. I try to read people’s blogs as much as possible when researching a topic. That’s how you find gems like this piece, which argues that correcting people’s grammar is just as egregious as side-stepping correct use altogether just because you can.

3. I went off on a side-quest reading about the weird formatting errors everywhere in the Epstein email dump and the people who think they’re actually a kind of code for even more nefarious activities. It turns out the raw data was poorly processed, leading to incomplete words and a lot of equal signs. The evil stuff was out in the open all along, who knew!

4. I also went down a rabbit hole researching Robert Maxwell’s disgusting meeting habits and, well, now you can’t unknow this either. You’re welcome?