Word: englishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...British empire, on which the sun never set, that originally spread English around the world, along with tea breaks, cuffed trousers and the stiff upper lip. But when the imperial sun finally did set after World War II, the American language followed American power into the vacuum. Key reason: the language has a rare forcefulness and flexibility. Even the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary last month incorporated such Americanisms as yuppie and zilch. Explained Editor Robert Burchfield: "Our language is changing slowly, and America is leading the way now, not Britain...
Commerce is the driving force. The ads in Italy's Corriere della Sera for just one day included the words personnel, administrator, quality audit, contract manager and know-how. Germans routinely refer to their employer as der Boss, who is expected to be a good Manager. "American English is definitely the model, not English--this is what we see looking through French advertising," says Micheline Faure, organizing secretary of a Paris group called AGULF, which was formed to resist the linguistic invasion. Japanese ads, posters and shopping bags are full of a special kind of American English, often starting with...
...show biz. Words such as network, rock, video, new wave, hit parade, album all turn up in Swedish or, for that matter, Arabic. Show biz helps introduce the language of romance: sexy, playboy and, eventually, baby sitter. In Japan, the English names for sexual organs are considered more polite than the Japanese terms, and pink is now the Japanese word for all erotic entertainment...
This combination of money and technology, show biz and sex appeal strikes many foreigners as the epitome of the American success story, and so they adopt English words that imply success itself: super, blue chip, boom, status symbol, summit. Some of that, clearly, is just snobbery. Through U.S. television, says British Grammarian Randolph Quirk, a foreigner can pick up an Americanized vocabulary "if you want to show you're with it and talking like Americans, the most fashionable people on earth." On the other hand, some upper-class Egyptian youths think it is chic to use Anglo-Saxon four-letter...
...simply acquire American terms, of course, but adapt and rework them in a sort of hybridization variously known as Franglais, Spanglish or Japlish. The Germans, who have traditionally enjoyed concocting exotic combinations like Satisfaktionsfahigkei t (the state of being socially eligible to fight a duel), now add English to German as though creating a polyglot strudel. Powerstimmung, for example, means a great mood, which can make a German ganz high or even ausgeflippt...