Fait accompli

Every so often someone makes the headlines by complaining that too many foreign words are making their way into English, and this has to stop. They give the impression that if this tendency goes on, there won't be any English language left. It will have been replaced by all the foreignisms.

American imports get a lot of the blame - words like cookie, closet, movie, apartment, campus, fries, soccer, mailbox. But other languages have given us plenty of words as well. Croissant from French. Delicatessen from German. Glitch from Yiddish. Macho from Spanish. Karaoke from Japanese. Gung-ho from Chinese. Moped from Swedish. Paparazzi from Italian. In other words, English is being infiltrated by other languages non-stop.

So why is this a problem? There seems to be some idea of linguistic purity - some mysterious essence of English - which is being corrupted by all these foreign intruders. They're turning our rich and sophisticated language into some second-rate and polluted language that's embarrassing to use.

What a load of nonsense. Words derived from other languages are constantly enriching and enhancing English. Without them our language would be static and stale and would gradually wither. New and unfamiliar words are fun to decipher and adapt to. And of course they're fun to try out on people who've never heard them.

In any case, what about all those English words that find their way into other countries' languages? I daresay those people who object to the pollution of English are quite happy to pollute other languages with our own linguistic migrants.

I suspect that the wholesale invasion of English by other languages is not a faux pas but simply a fait accompli.