On the Ubiquity of English

How fortunate we are to speak English.
On the walking tour in the old town, there were 30 or so of us, from Slovenia, Belgium, Sweden, Uruguay, Singapore and several other countries and languages. The tour, of course, was in English.
At the restaurant, the couple next to us were from Bavaria. To order from the Italian waiter, they spoke English, of course.
The guide to the crypt and the ritual baths gave his spiel first in Italian, naturally, and then, just as naturally, in English—not in French, not in Spanish, not in German, although there were people listening from all those countries. But English was the universal tongue, the lingua Franca we all had in common.
At the bus stop, trying to figure out which bus and what stop to get off at, we asked the woman waiting alongside us. She was from outside Valencia, in Spain, and we were in Italy, and obviously we spoke in English.
Our language is indispensable. And we take that for granted; we assume it and we assume correctly. Maybe it’s why Americans seem to be so bad at other languages.
We eventually learned a serviceable French by living in France for nearly a decade. But generally, for most of us, our high school Spanish and our one year of required French in college don’t seem to have made much difference in our national reluctance to engage others in their language or made us remotely conversant. We blunder along expecting everyone will understand us. And, in fact, they do.
But how much better it would be, how much richer, if we were like the rest of the world and could acceptably speak a language other than our own.