Happy Birthday to Kenny! May he have many more!

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Just found this .sig file on my division manager's e-mail: If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings."

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And an interesting bit from yesterday's "Word of the Day" e-mail message, worth quoting in full to show just how ludicrous some things can get (in terms of the original message that spawned the response):

After a recent week of words from law, where many of the words are of French origin, I received this email from a reader:

"I propose you no longer feature words which have a base or stem from the French language. I no longer see that as a positive e-mail."

In these times when emotions run high, it's understandable why someone would say that, why US lawmakers would rename French fries and French toast in their cafeteria menus. Or why some German professors think they need to
exclude English terms from their vocabulary.

This is not the first time linguistic revisionism is being attempted. During World War I, in the US, some had tried to rename sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage", for example. But we're all so interconnected, as are our languages, that any such attempt quickly falls flat on its face.

"Freedom fries" they say? Well, there's still some French remaining, as the word fry comes from Old French frire. "Freedom toast"? What about toast which comes from Middle French toster. Thinking along these lines, we may even have to rename the US (from Old French estat). Estimates vary, but one-quarter or more of words in the English language have a French influence. In the two lines that the above-mentioned reader sent us, at least six words have French connections (propose, feature, base, language, positive, mail).

A language isn't owned by a country. French belongs as much to France as to Senegal or Canada or anyone else who speaks it. To celebrate the diversity of the English language, this week we'll look at five words that have come into English from five different languages.

-Anu
anu@wordsmith.org