IF a successful holiday can be defined by the number of souvenirs the traveller brings home, then the English language is the ultimate tourist.  The language has a habit of picking up titbits from every other country that it happens to visit and, hey-presto! The newly borrowed word soon appears in the Oxford English Dictionary and becomes accepted currency in the international lexicon.

Just to illustrate the point: the introductory paragraph to this article has only a handful of words that date back to Old English.  Everything else has been picked up along the way, like lint.  Possibly this is because English itself doesn’t actually amount to much.  Take away the Latin and Old German and there isn’t much left.  So most of the language we speak today can be traced to the progress of English around the world. This is also the secret to the durability of the lingo.  The Arabs, the Phoenicians, the Portuguese – these were all great sea-faring nations, but they tended to keep to themselves and not mingle too much with the inhabitants of the places they visited. The English, on the other hand, were compulsive colonisers and simply could not imagine that any country would not be profoundly grateful for the civilisation that they brought.  They would introduce their language and pepper it with any local terms they found useful, which would then go home with them again as interesting luggage. As linguist James Nicholl says:  “We don’t just borrow words.  On occasions English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” Just like the footpads, English isn’t all that picky about the words it picks up.  French and Spanish and German purists are trying very hard to avoid the easy use of English words like biftek and le weekend (the French government even tried to introduce a law), but English just happily appropriates words from all over.  And then it spreads the love by delivering these new words back to the language that it was borrowed from in the first place. Veldt, verandah, chutney, pyjamas, pawpaw, zero, algebra – the list is endless.  And not all the borrowed words are old, either. We get Chinese words like chow, gung-ho and honcho, which were picked up by the American navy stationed in the Pacific during World War II.  About that time we got ‘Shanghaied’ which means a forced conscription of goods or people.  But in the last few years we have ‘Bangalored’ which refers to someone who has lost their job because of international outsourcing (think about the growth of call-centres and computer laboratories based in Bangalore, India.) One of the interesting things about English is that some identical words have different meanings because they have entirely different origins.  For instance, the military tattoo comes from the Dutch ‘taptoe’ (close the tap) from the time when soldiers used to visit taverns at closing time to shut off the taps of casks.  But the dubious artwork called a tattoo is actually Polynesian and was brought back (along with the custom) with Captain James Cook after his exploration of the Pacific Ocean. Speaking of things Pacific, the Australian contribution to English has been colourful.  Many Australian words are borrowed from the Aborigine, but an enormous number are old English words that have endured in Australia when they have already died out in England.  There are also some terms that are just pure Australian, and it says a lot for the Australian way of life that most of these refer to the consequences of drinking too much.  One I particularly enjoyed when I joined a group of Australians on holiday in Egypt was ‘lung lolly’ for a cigarette.  One doesn’t really know, when looking at an Australian dictionary, how many of these words are really used or whether they are just kept as quaint ‘touristy’ kind of words, like ‘Larrikin’ for a hoodlum, ‘Razoo’ for a lack of funds, or ‘Shivoo’ for a party that gets out of hand.  On the other hand, I adore the word ‘wowser’ (spoilsport) and would love to find an excuse to use it. And here’s an interesting one:  the word ‘snack’ comes from the Middle Dutch ‘snakken’ (to yearn for something) from the phrase ‘snakken naar lucht’ – to gasp for air.  Another way in which foreign words entered the English language was by taking a place-name for a product of that area.  So ‘polony’ comes from Bologna sausage, the ‘conga’ comes from the Congo via the Caribbean, the metal ‘copper’ comes from Cyprus where it was first discovered, the ‘jean’ from Genoa, made out of ‘denim’ from De Nimes in France, ‘sardine’ from Sardinia – and lots more. The most intriguing one, however, is the word bikini for the abbreviated bathing suit.  It was named after the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific where American atomic-bomb testing was conducted in 1946.  Not because of any geographical connection, but because the swimsuit, like the atoll, was small but explosive!