Do have brainstormen sessions at the office? Like chatten online? If so, you’re using Denglish, the unwanted linguistic love child between German and English. Such bastardization of the world’s languages by Anglo jargon continues to drive linguists around the world to drink… er, drink warm English beer. And it’s not just Germans that are bringing English into their daily conversations – Italians have said ‘buon giorno’ to over 1,400 Anglicisms over the last 15 years. In 1994, France passed the Toubon Law to prevent continued slippage of English into French culture… there’s even a ‘Museum of Horror’ (or, si vous préférez, Musée des horreurs…) dedicated to common use of English in ads or signage in France. How to combat the brutish hordes of English vocabulary? Well, there’s a few options… we could wait a few generations for chat and online lingo to take over… but even this has some you say tomato, I say tomato problems. (For example, in English smiley emoticons are :) or :-) … but smiling Korean netaholics say ^^ or ^_^. ) Or, we could change the entire world over to Esperanto, so everyone’s on an equal footing – no one would understand anything. But if you’re one of us ignorant English-speaking bastards, we’ll probably sit back and continue to demand you learn our language. Hey, life’s not fair… and it’s even less fair if you can’t read this sentence.
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