[AnimalMuppet]

Let me guess: You're a professional programmer.

I am, too. I (and, I assume, other professional programmers) want sharply-defined primitives/keywords/operators. Vagueness really gets in our way. And the problem is that English words don't have the kind of precise definitions that we need.

But COBOL wasn't built for us. The design goal of COBOL was to make professional programmers obsolete - to make it so anyone could program. (Epic fail on that design goal - COBOL was once the most common language used by professional programmers.) For the intended users, the "using ordinary words" was a feature, not a bug. But the actual users and the intended users are different people, and the English-like syntax doesn't work for the actual users.