WALK through an international city and you will see quite a lot of English. Walk through an expat-dense neighbourhood in Berlin, like the one Johnson has recently moved to, and you’ll see more than the average, such as “Fastfood”, “Women’s wear”, “Coffee to go” on three storefronts spotted the other day. Using English in a city where many visitors and even residents don’t speak German makes sense. Besides English-as-English, though, German itself has also taken on quite a lot of English words. The on-line, user-written Wiktionary lists some 900 of them (surely under-counting). The definitions begin with abgefuckt (“in a sorry state”) and end in der Zoom (the feature on camera lenses). The liberal salting of English words into German sentences is called “Denglisch” (Deutsch and Englisch), and it tends to annoy traditionalists.

There are several different kinds of Denglisch. One is the English word that has become fully standard in German: das Baby is the normal way to refer to a new human, edging out the older Säugling (charmingly cognate to the English “suckling”). Baby is now also a term of endearment in German, just as in English.

Further along the spectrum are words that Germans use but which have not entirely edged out their ur-German rivals. Take Das Basement, spotted in a Berlin shopping mall. The word is still less common than the native Untergeschoss. But Johnson was surprised, and even a little displeased, to spot it for the first time. Das Basement, really? What on earth is wrong with Untergeschoss? Is it because the shopping mall is quintessentially American?

If this were not bad enough, some of the borrowing seems incompetent. What Brits call a mobile and Americans call a cell phone, Germans call a Handy—a word that looks borrowed from English, but isn’t. The baseball cap—a common faux-hip ornament in today’s Germany—is a Basecap. And Germans call table football Kicker, a game unknown in the English-speaking world. (The mangling goes both ways, as Americans alter the German Fussball to foosball.) And when a rude word is borrowed, its taboo in the original language does not always travel with it. Angela Merkel is just one of many Germans who don't realise that you can't just casually uses the word Shitstormin a press conference. The word has become common enough to be added to Germany's most prestigious dictionary, the Duden.

Bastian Sick, who writes a language column for the Spiegel magazine, pokes gentle fun at Denglish. Since the tide of Anglicisms can’t be wished away, he at least wants to uphold standards in using them. Foreign words can be made into German verbs by suffixing –ieren (itself borrowed from the French verb ending –er). So interessieren and schockieren are nothing interesting or shocking. But Germans are normalising such verbs: in one column, Mr Sick noticed a fellow journalist using the past participles geschockt and gemarkt instead of shockiert and markiert. This means that the new forms have the traditional German “ge-“ that is added to native verbs, and omit the foreign-marking –ieren. Mr Sick finds this faddish and unappealing, but to the outsider, it's a lovely example of language change happening before one's eyes.

Virtually every language borrows words (English quite promiscuously). These can be highborn terms of philosophy and art or the common Basecap, depending on the cultural contact any two languages are having at a given time. (It’s no surprise to see so many terms from pop culture and technology coming from English.) One linguist, Guy Deutscher, has aptly compared language to a reef. It is constantly growing, borrowing, changing, living—but we only notice the new additions on top. Long ago changes, once “fads” or “errors”, now form the solid foundation. So it is with German, and even “Denglish”. Purists, take heart.