Someone was banging on the outer door of the Teeny Apartment.

I was there to pick up a few things, and just sit for a moment, and I had a visitor?

I unlocked the door, and there was a man I had never before seen. Perhaps 35. Almost certainly from the subcontinent. And he was trying to tell me something. Which was going to be a problem considering I do not speak a word of (let’s guess here) Urdu.

But this man knew some English. Not much (less than Mr. Mohammed), but enough to get out the words “caretaker” (apparently he is the complex’s caretaker, at least for the moment), and “water” and “OK”. Allowing me to guess that we had some issue with the water, and now it was fixed, and perhaps I should check to see if mine was OK. (Which I did, turning on the faucets but noticing a little air in the lines … so, yes, it was about the water.)

And this was … “Globish” in action.

I just finished reading the book entitled “Globish” in which a British journalist posits that English already has become the planet’s default/second language, the argot in which friends and co-workers and business partners from one end of the world to the other speak … because they can.

The author, Robert McCrum, suggests that this sort of utilitarian, perhaps not-quite-correct English will become even more common in the coming years and could do for the planet what esperanto was supposed to do — provide the basis for a global language.

(Hence the neologism “globish” … melding “globe” and “English”.)

I certainly have lived it in Abu Dhabi.

Almost all serious business here seems to be done in English. Even though the number of native English speakers in the country can’t be more than 2-3 percent. It’s just easier to muddle through in your second language (English) than to try to speak/negotiate in Arabic or Malayalam or Bengali or Urdu or Hindi or Filipino when only one side knows any of those languages.

McCrum traces the history of English, beginning with a maybe a million people on a small and remote island … and notes how that little country turned into the British Empire, which took the language to distant places such as India. Then segues into the American cultural empire of the past century (movies, pop culture) and how that further popularized and spread English.

He suggests that English is somehow a bit superior to other languages in that it is particularly flexible, open to capturing words from other languages and dynamic. Maybe.

But he also notes that English was close to its high-water mark, internationally, when the internet took hold, and how the web, which is mostly in English, has only reinforced the utilitarianism (if not requirement) of English around the world. Giving it an even bigger lead among the world’s languages. Even though more people speak Mandarin fluently than English, almost no one speaks Mandarin as a second language. Nor will they in the future.

He contends that English has a firmer grip on the biggest part of the world in the history of the world, far outstripping Greek in, say, the third century BC or Latin 500 years later or French at its zenith (perhaps the 17th century). It not only is the language of the intelligentsia, it also is the language of the street, or can be … as we can discover here by listening to a Pakistani speak to an Indian. In English.

He also notes that several countries around the world are making a concerted effort to teach their citizens English. Chile, apparently has made English an official language. And the author contends that more than 300 million Chinese are currently trying to learn English.

That’s the gist of the book, and it just reinforces one notion: How lucky those of us are who were born with English as our mother tongue at the exact moment when it is an enormous linguistic gift. We could have been born in any one of 100 countries which speak languages almost no one outside their borders speak. Instead, we had the lottery and know the one language that is understood nearly everywhere in the world. How easy was that?

For a deeper and much longer review of “Globish,” I recommend this piece that appeared in The National last weekend. It is not nearly as negative as the headlines make it sound. The critic simply suggests that some of McCrum’s more enthusiastic suggestions about English may not actually happen, and we can agree there.

Meantime, every day, I speak Globish, and so does just about everyone in this country of 7 million. Including the backup caretaker at the Teeny Apartment.