OK, so I'm a week late with this, but it still deserves to have a diary about it even this late after the fact.
Here in Georgia, there was a bill recently passed by the state Senate which would require that the written part of the state driving test only be offered in English, getting rid of all the other languages in which the state currently offers the test.
Yet amazingly, that's not the most ridiculous part of this tale.
According to this Macon Telegraph article, state Senator Jack Murphy, the sponsor of the bill, claimed that anyone who can't read the test also wouldn't be able to read street signs, and that taking the test in English is not "too much of a burden" for a non-native speaker.
As someone who's actually doing research regarding language comprehension, all I can say is... what?
It's possible to understand street signs with knowledge of merely a select few words in English. Indeed, many street signs are comprehensible without any knowledge of English at all; in fact, most signs are specifically designed so that the meaning is easily identifiable by shape and color, and many feature no writing at all.
The driving test, on the other hand, requires quite a bit more knowledge of English than is necessary for street signs. It's not just a matter of recognizing certain key words; one has to actually understand the questions, grammar and all. There's a big difference between "you pass a car" and "you are passed by a car", and even knowing all the vocabulary necessary for the most obscure road signs may still not be enough to make that distinction.
One of Murphy's fellow state senators ought to test him on the most common road signs in Mexico... and then give him a driving test in Spanish. Let's just say, I don't think the results would be quite what Sen. Murphy would have expected.