"The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses."

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We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.

— Jared Diamond