It is impossible that the people of the world today could agree upon a single international language that everyone would be able to speak and understand. In the United Nations there are five official languages—English, Chinese, Russian, French and Spanish. How about making one of them into an international language? English has been worked on for this purpose. A basic word list of B50 English words named Basic English was made. These are the only verbs in the entire list: 'come, go, give, keep, let, do, put, make, say, be, seem, may, will, have, send.' Writing in Basic English may require you to use a great number of words—as in having to say 'it came to my ear' instead of 'I heard'—but you can still say anything you want to with just 850 different words and a few suffixes and prefixes. This is a much smaller number of words to have to be memorizes than ordinary words offered to students of a foreign language. But people have always had a need to do more than simply 'tell it as it is'. Language is for reporting not only one's work. For this, a language needs all kinds of grammar and style. that throw back its history and development just as a person needs eyebrows. Is there some special reason why our lips should be a different color from the rest of our face? Perhaps not, but this is how people—real people—are. For communication between people, languages in all kinds will remain to reflect the growth of the societies that speak them. In this passage, 'tell it as it is' means '______'.