It’s easy to snigger at foreigners and their funny, not-quite-English words – but how many of us realise that our own language contains plenty of the same thing the other way around? Howard Moss points out that “if you ask for a latte in Italy, you’ll get a glass of milk.” Likewise, “panini means bread rolls in Italian and in its singular form is panino.” So when we ask for ‘two paninis please’, it’s like an Italian requesting ‘due rollsi’.

Americans call the main course of their meal the entrée, but in French l’entrée means ‘the entrance’, so it should probably describe the first. And when the British respond to a risqué joke with ‘ooh la la’ there’s a sauciness implied that just isn’t there in the original French words, risqué meaning ‘risked’ (a verb, not an adjective) and oh là là a great many things from ‘wow’ to ‘oh dear’, none of them very sexy. (There are no double entendres in France, where the phrase does not exist or make sense.)

As English speakers we don’t generally know where our words come from, and probably care even less. It’s easy to be relaxed when yours is the language the rest of the world learns to get ahead. But the fact is that all of us are borrowing from each other, mixing and matching, repurposing for our needs and sometimes getting it a bit wrong. That’s just how language works.

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