Linguistic Americans
"The English language is the result of Roman soldiers trying to chat up Saxon barmaids, and about as legitimate as the other issue." -- H. Beam Piper (from Space Viking, 1962 or thereabouts)
Once upon a time I was in Germany, conversing with some techs. They were trying to find a way to express, in German, the word "vignetting" as a technical term in photography -- the effect that causes the center of the frame to be more exposed than the edges, without measures taken to avoid this.
They worked at it for some time without a clear result, coming up with some rather Twainish jawcrackers in the process. Finally I told them that they were working hard to no purpose; they should adopt the practice of English speakers.
Linguistic Imperialism!
That is, if another language contains a short or somehow attractive term for something difficult to express in English -- English speakers will simply steal the said term, file the serial numbers off, and put it in the dictionary. Gestalt is an English word, and isn't pronounced anything like the original German! [There are multitudes of other examples, some from the French rehearsed above.] Vignette is a French word meaning something entirely different; how it got to be a photographic technical term is a long story --
The Germans in question, being good Stalinist East Germans (this was 1983, back when there was such a place) were properly aghast at the notion.
But that's the way it works, and has since antiquity. The practice of treating French borrow-words as high class, and Saxon-derived ones as plebian, probably dates to the Norman Conquest, after which the Normans' doxies were elegantly nhuid, while the Anglo-Saxon peasants bathed ne kod in the creek.
So, nothing new under the sun, eh, Ashton?
