Franca Fixed: Lingua

It is imperfect by design: verbs stripped of their subjunctive dreams, nouns abandoned in the wrong gender, accents smoothed down like stones in a river.

Its beauty is utility: a rope bridge over a gorge, a splint on a broken leg, a key that turns in a hundred different locks, none of them its own. lingua franca

It is not beautiful, not in the way Italian is beautiful, or the precise cruelty of German, or the musical lilt of Yoruba. It is imperfect by design: verbs stripped of