Glob-ish

The snake oil salesmen exist in every field, and the eternal debate about a lingua franca proves to be no exception. Trading on the remarkable revelation that two non-native speakers of English tend to understand each other better than they will a native speaker, Jean-Paul Nerriere is one of the nigglingly most seriously taken recent arrivals to the 'anything but English' camp for a global language. It pains me to say this, but it's no surprise he's French. Much as England has a preoccupation with Germany as some perpetual nemesis, though that battleground may have shifted from war to sport, whereas the Germans are largely indifferent and simultaneously bemused by that obsession, the French have an enduring siege mentality towards 'Anglo-Saxon' cultural invasion which is still a hangover from losing out at centuries of rivalry with global domination and has been badly exacerbated by anything the US does.
Nerriere's stroke of genius, Globish, has somehow managed to make the completely Latinate-centric Esperanto, with virtually all the design faults of its source languages, including noun genders and verbal conjugations, look reasonable. It would be a good practical joke, if that's all it was. Here's a selection of what Nerriere would seriously have us do:

Don't say: Piano (probably one of the most internationally widespread words there is!)
Do say: An instrument with black and white keys

Don't say: Tomato
Do say: A round red fruit (is that a cherry? most people worldwide will probably still see a tomato as a vegetable; they're not botanists)

Don't say: Kitchen
Do say: The room in which we cook

Don't say: Mouse (FFS! Mickey Mouse, anyone?)
Do say: An animal chased by cats. (A rat? A bird? A squirrel?)

...and it goes on in the same vein. Instead of using one straightforward high-frequency noun or verb, the Globish speaker has to construct a sentence of up to eight words, often with relative clauses.

Sure, English has its own design faults. Phrasal verbs are a nightmare (for the benefit of the uninitiated, see how many different meanings you reach when you add prepositions to 'get') and there's precious little consistency between spelling and pronunciation. So why not address those instead? Continued discussion of Globish is an intellectual embarrassment, nothing more.