Unlike the official idea of the French language being conserved and defended by the Académie Française, English (in all its varieties) is a language that is constantly re-making itself. Of course, the actual French language spoken by actual French speakers is also evolving in all kinds of interesting ways, but the Académie tries to do everything it can to keep French, well, French. English isn’t like that. Still have that dictionary out? Thumb through a bit and check out the etymology, or origins, of a sample of English words. These things come from everywhere! They’re rooted in German, English, Latin, even French; Dutch seems to have lent us some of our best dirty words (probably because all those hard “K” sounds are just funny to begin with). No wonder none of us can spell. Even though we do have a fair number of self proclaimed language experts who would like to preserve English the way they imagine it was widely written in Jane Austen’s day (and seem to be constantly correcting us as they defend what they see as the “rules”), English is basically an inclusive language, welcoming new words and usages when they seem helpful.
To borrow an idea from my IT background, English is a lot like the “open source” movement in software development. Everyone is welcome to contribute to the creation of the language and no one “owns” the final product. Because its evolution never stops, there never actually is a “final” product. This model can work miraculously well in certain situations (check out Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia, for a useful example). It can also be a disaster. Several big companies have experimented with Wikipedia-like websites, allowing anyone to post unedited messages, but had to pull the plug when they found that much of the content added by the public wasn’t exactly flattering to their businesses. Of course, this free-wheeling openness better suits Americans’ sense of who were are, whether it’s accurate or not. While the French are busy trying to protect their culture against outside words and ideas, we’re enthusiastically adopting foreign words and making up new ones. We like to think of ourselves as a “melting pot.” What could possibly exemplify this better than the big gooey mess of our language with its multicultural roots and frustrating complexities? Take the phrase “twenty-four seven,” often written as “24/7” and meant to indicate something that happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While it grates on my nerves every time I hear a middle-aged broadcaster use it, it has become a part of the language because it represents an easy shortcut for a common idea. Besides, we need it in our dictionaries just in case aliens land on Earth, find our civilization in ruins, and need to decipher what’s being shouted on all those recordings of Jerry Springer.
Think how hard it would be to get by without some of the words that have been borrowed by American English. How could we possibly describe any female celebrity without using the word diva? What would we name our new tract housing developments if we couldn’t give them an air of luxury by calling them Tuscany Villas or Casa Montepulciano? One development listed in my newspaper offered four models of homes, the Lucera, Bergamo, Marsanne and Dolcetto. Not a Williamsburg or Mayfair in the bunch. What would we call our daughters if not Brittany or one of the seemingly endless variations on the name? And we’re not happy just borrowing words from other languages; English grows with additions from all kinds of interesting and unexpected places. Dictionary publishers love to get publicity by creating news stories about new words added to their latest editions. My favorite of these recent additions is D’oh!, the exclamation made famous by Homer Simpson, which you can now find in both Webster’s Millennium Dictionary of English and the Oxford English Dictionary, which many consider to be the closest thing our language has to a final authority. How cool is that?
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