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I like it when language enthusiasts try to use etymology as an argument. Especially in the English language. Let’s face it: English is a smörgåsbord of languages, and I’m not just talking about all the borrowed words for medical terms (e.g. angina, from Latin from Greek), anatomy (e.g. pectoris, from Middle English from Latin) and animals (e.g. giraffe, from romance languages from Arabic). No, it is more than just taking various words and fitting them to our syntax. It is more than taking a word from another language and misusing it. (A ménage à toi is not what your frat guy buddy pretended to have with the two drunk girls in his room (or at least, not in French).)
English is not the tossed salad of languages. It is the melting pot. We throw things in and, pretty soon, they are no longer recognizable or distinguishable. We take bits from one language, then rules from another. For example, the word Octopus. Now, the correct plural (according to most dictionaries) is octopuses. But we all like to say octopi, don’t we? Of course we do! The Latin plural suffix –i is just irresistible to us. Plural of cactus? Cacti! Focus? Foci! Hippopotamus? Hippopotami! Jesus? Jesi! Penis? Peni!
Ok, so I am getting carried away. But it is easy to do! However, there actually is (or at least, was, at some point) a rhyme and reason to all of this. The –i plural suffix comes from Latin, and is therefore often used with latin-based words, such as cactus and focus. Hippopotamus is a bit trickier, because it comes to us from Latin from Greek. So, since Latin pluralizes –us¬ words to –i¬, we have our choice of hippopotami or hippopotamuses. But octopus comes directly from Greek, so applying the Latin –i ending is wrong; we should instead apply the Greek plural and make it octopodes. Yes, say it aloud, octopodes. It is even more fun than octopi, isn’t it?
We take Latin endings and throw them on Greek words. We are like the Iron Chef of languages. We work with what we’ve got, and we are proud of what we make with it! So what if it doesn’t make sense. Refried beans aren’t one step past fried beans. To iterate something implies to “utter something repeatedly”, yet after repeated utterings, we can still reiterate it. Though we don’t reconcile after we have conciled, nor do we repeat that which we have peated or recoup that which was previously couped. Flammable is the same thing as inflammable, though opportune is the opposite of inopportune. We sprinkle prefixes around on words like we are adding flavour and flare.
English is a language that went across the world with colonization and the British Navy, and we continue to invade other cultures today via our media, our movies, our books, our television, our internet. Find me someone who has never been exposed to the English-speaking world, not even through badly translated movies, and I will show you a person who is extremely isolated. We permeate, we pervade into other cultures and leave our mark. And in return? We allow other cultures to do the same on our language. We are as confident in the grammatical rules of English as Columbus was with his “shortcut” to India.
We aren’t the Germans, who must maintain order and logic to the extent that they had a Writing Reform in the 1990s, because some words just weren’t logical anymore. (daß shall henceforth be spelled dass, because the ß (sharp S, also spelled ss in websites and emails and such...) only belongs after a long vowel!) This left most people in a state of utter confusion, and people still have difficulties remembering what is the ‘new’ correct way of writing. (But I don’t know anyone who revolted and said, “No way, dass is daß, and that is it!”)
We also aren’t the French, who have their own Academie to make sure that all the words are frenchified enough to fit in. They don’t want anything sounding too much like another language, so even if they do borrow a word (such as cool, which seems to have made it to pretty much every language spoken in the world, somehow, though I am not sure what happened to the other words of that era, like far out, groovy, cat, and jive) they are under constitutional obligation to pronounce it in the heaviest accent that they can muster.
No, we are the English speakers. We might use foreign words to spice up our vocab and make us seem impressive, or we take a word like bourgeois and, because nobody really knows how to pronounce it, and even people who can spell it correctly have to think about it, we shorten it to bougie, which, incidentally, is an actual word for a surgical instrument that nobody cares about because we aren’t all doctors. Yes, we allow all words in, and English speakers are the most likely to mix in dabbles of foreign language when abroad. Our doors are open, people! Drop in a word, or make up your own, because it just might stick! Just one word on a blog or a forum can spread like wildfire and become a meme!
