"Indeed，" George Washington wrote in his diary in 1785， "some kind of fly， or bug， had begun to eat the leaves before I left home．" But the father of America was not the father of bug． When Washington wrote that， Englishmen had been referring to insects as bugs for more than a century， and Americans had already created lightning-bug（萤火虫）． But the English were soon to stop using the bugs in their language， leaving it to the Americans to call a bug a bug in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries．

The American bug could also be a person， referring to someone who was crazy about a particular activity． Although fan became the usual term， sports fans used to be called racing bugs， baseball bugs， and the like．

Or the bug could be a small machine or object， for example， a bug-shaped car． The bug could also be a burglar alarm， from which comes the expression to bug， that is， "to install （安装） an alarm"． Now it means a small piece of equipment that people use for listening secretly to others' conversation． Since the 1840s， to bug has long meant "to cheat"， and since the 1940s it has been annoying．

We also know the bug as a flaw in a computer program or other design． That meaning dates back to the time of Thomas Edison． In 1878 he explained bugs as "little problems and difficulties" that required months of study and labor to overcome in developing a successful product． In 1889 it was recorded that Edison "had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug' in his invented record player．"

I came across quite a few language problems while spending holiday with my family last summer. The most embarrassing was when my Mom apologized to the people we were staying with because her “pants were dirty”. They looked at her in surprise, not knowing how to react. You see, Mom had fallen over and gotten mud on her jeans. But in Britain, “pants” means underpants or knickers (内裤；衬裤), not trousers as it does back home.

Katie — From America

I went to stay with a friend on the west coast last summer. Her flat was on the first floor of a high-rise building so I got the lift up. Then I wandered round for ages looking for her flat but couldn’t find it. Fed up and tired, I finally had to go out to find a phone box. She explained that her flat was on the first floor, which for me meant the ground floor.

David — From Britain

When I asked for the “restroom” in a big department store, people kept directing me to a room with seats where I could sit and “rest”. It took me years to get through to (使……明白) someone that I only wanted the toilet!

Tom — From America

Right now someone is speaking or thinking in a language that is on the verge of disappearing. Of the world’s roughly 7,000 spoken languages, one dies every 40 days, according to one estimate — languages like Babanki, spoken in Cameroon.

And some of the places where rare languages are the most concentrated are also most vulnerable (易受影响的) to climate change. Especially, linguists call global warming the final nail in the coffin (致命一击) for more than half of humanity’s language disappearing.

Let’s take Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation, for example. It’s very small, but it has 110 languages spoken there, which is the highest density (密度) of languages in the world. It is also one of the countries most at risk of sea level rise and climate change. There, you can often see perfect hurricanes.

So if rising seas or storms force people in Vanuatu to move to Australia, what happens to the language they speak? Well, what often happens is that they aren’t necessarily displaced with the same people in their community, and also, even if they are displaced with other people in their community, they and their children will often adopt the language of Australia, the dominant language there because it’s economically advantageous for them to speak the new language, the dominant language. And their language dies.

However, there is so much culturally lost when a language dies. It is because the language carries so much local knowledge and culture.

In fact, in the 1970s, it was something like 2,000 native speakers of Hawaiian remained. But activists launched some schools where children are taught from birth, usually by kind of grandparents, and now more than 18,700 people speak it. And the same thing happened in New Zealand in the 1970s. Only 5% of young Maori people spoke the language, but now something like 25% now speak it.