Grumpy Old Men by David Quantick

Author:David Quantick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2003-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The French have that Academic francaise thing where they try to vet words before they enter the language. In much the same way, presumably, that King Canute tried to vet the sea before it came onto the beach. You can’t stop it, mate. It’s historical inevitability.

But the really sad linguistic thing is making words look like they were out or your own language in the first place. ‘Taxi’ in Welsh is ‘Tacsi’, written that way, as Kingsley Amis remarked, for the benefit of Welsh people who’ve never seen an X before. In Ukrainian, the word for ‘haircut’ is ‘herkut’. The weirdest one of all is the Maltese word ‘xemindifer’ which sounds really exotic and means ‘railway’. It’s nicked, ironically, from the French word for railway, ‘chemin de fer’. Which, by the way, means ‘way of iron’ and is another typically crap roundabout way of saying something sensible like railway.

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