Watch your language

On Permanent Loan
Essay by Christopher Levenson

[Editor’s Note: This is a chapter within a larger work on the subject of language, and its evolution]

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No living language is self-sufficient. We all need to borrow words from other languages occasionally.  But the term ‘loan word’ is misleading.  It’s not like going to a neighbour to borrow a cup of sugar, which you then return with thanks a day or so later. It’s more akin to the ‘On permanent loan’ signs that you see attached to paintings or other exhibits in a museum or art gallery.

If, as the poet John Donne famously wrote, “no man is an island,” the statement applies even more to languages. For language is by definition social, a matter of agreed and accepted usage.  Consequently, whenever we interact with foreigners by means of speech, we are likely to come across in their language (or even in their use of our own language) new words or phrases that will sound just right for something we ourselves have always wanted to say.

Nowadays such interactions are mostly a matter of choice but when they are imposed by an invading, colonizing force as was the case with the Norman Conquest or, as many people in Africa, the Caribbean, or South Asia know, by the builders of the British Empire, the effects will be profound and long-lasting, especially when it involves, as it usually does, the suppression or marginalization of indigenous languages. And it is not just the state itself: the same applies also to various churches’ deliberate attempts to suppress native languages by banning their use in residential schools.

Granted, when we discuss loan words everything depends on how far back in our language we want to go. When does English, as we know it today, start?  With Anglo Saxon?  With so-called Middle English, the language of Chaucer? Either way we have to recognize that the habit of borrowing started very early on. If we go back further than the all-important Norman Conquest to the times before the Danish and Viking invasions and subsequent Scandinavian rule, we would have to do without such basic words as law, to call, hit, husband, knife, leg, root, skin, want, and wrong.

Most loan words become landed immigrants and many take on permanent citizenship, mainly because they have useful skills. So, what we need to do first is to locate what we have borrowed and then decide in specific instances whether we prefer to use a foreign word or the home-grown English one. I have already suggested that words used in the practice of law, such as assizes, a court sitting, from the French verb s’asseoir, to seat oneself, along with the words judge, jury, sheriff, defendant, go so far back and have been so thoroughly anglicized that it would be pedantic to regard them as other than English words. But beyond these there are many others that have taken up permanent residence so that although we are aware for instance that reservoir, garage, depot, souvenir, and chef are not pronounced in the same way as native English words, they do not strike us as foreign.

But what do we do with words such as malaise or coup d’état let alone the altogether more brisk German term for the seizure of state power, putsch?  And how about that other very useful German term, zeitgeist, usually rendered in English as ‘the spirit of the age’?  This, as I hope to demonstrate, is especially the case with certain French words for historical reasons, not just geographical proximity. Here in officially bilingual Canada you can tell just by looking at a tax form or the instructions for use attached to your new microwave oven that French usually takes up more space and uses more words to explain something. Whereupon Francophones would probably object that French is considered longer because it is more exact, less ambiguous. They have a point: if in English Canada you see a sign that reads ‘Alarmed Door’ you are entitled to wonder how an inanimate object such as a door can express its alarm.

Indeed, a lot of English language humour depends precisely on such accidental or deliberate misunderstandings, due to the number of homonyms and their potential for use as puns. (e.g. it is the duty of all monarchs to give themselves airs.) However, not all French expressions are longer than their English counterparts and many French words and phrases have become naturalized, precisely because they express certain things, especially states of mind, more concisely than anything we have in English. That’s certainly the case with manqué:  if one speaks of a poet or architect manqué one is referring to people who would have liked to be poets or architects but weren’t because they did not have, or did not feel themselves to have, the necessary attributes. Unlike a wannabe, which implies future possibility, a somebody manqué has already in the past missed his or her vocation.  To use the French term here saves a lot of explanation, provided of course that your listener is familiar with the expression.

The same is true, for slightly different reasons, of the phrase l’esprit de l’escalier, literally the wit of the staircase, and again for those who know the term it summons up a whole scenario: someone who has attended a party or a reception or otherwise engaged in conversation and thinks of a witty, telling rejoinder to someone’s comment only after he or she has left the apartment and is descending the stairs. Maybe English speakers are more agile in verbal combat or, more likely, they are out of the house and halfway home before they think of a suitable repartee, but either way English does not have a handy, brief characterization of this phenomenon, so it is useful to have at your fingertips, in French, a way of evoking this situation.

Not that words should have to take a pledge of allegiance or produce a certificate of citizenship before they are accepted. But who judges the acceptance? How can we tell how naturalized, how ‘landed,’ immigrant words have become? One way is to ask whether we usually abbreviate them. For obvious reasons, you abbreviate only those words that you and the people you are talking or writing to are comfortable with. Just as Patricia may become Pat to her friends and Andrew Andy to his, so too a Latin word like omnibus will soon be shortened to bus, perambulator (baby carriage or stroller in North America) becomes pram, the French word limousine becomes limo and the German delicatessen ends up as a deli.

While on the subject of shortened forms of names, it may be worth considering another aspect. Most people seem to think that the saying ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ means that we come to despise things that we know too well. I suppose that is a possible meaning but in fact what it originally meant was that addressing strangers as if they were family or old friends breeds contempt in the persons so addressed. A few years ago, one of the big Canadian banks had a slogan which described it as ‘a first name kind of bank’: for me that might be reason enough to avoid banking there. If I knew the bank manager or the tellers socially, outside the bank, I would be happy to have them call me Chris and I would use their first names, but I hate the way that some salespeople, as soon as they discover your full name, in my case Christopher Levenson, say “Well, Chris, what can we do for you?”  That is familiarity, but it is tolerated by many Canadians because they fear above all being thought of as elitist. What is at stake is not friendship but power. I am hardly the only one who, when visiting a doctor’s office, has been totally put off, by the doctor walking in and saying “Hello, I”m Doctor So-and-so” and then proceeding to address me as Chris or Christopher. I feel like saying, “I’d like you to call me Professor Levenson.” I don’t ever say this because it would ruin the doctor-patient relationship straight off, but then, for me it has already been ruined in that he or she – women doctors are often as bad in this respect – is assuming a superior, quasi-parental dynamic.

Fake folksiness is another aspect of this, evident in CBC Radio’s probably vain quest for a younger, more ‘hip’ audience. We find presenters referring to Shakespeare as Bill, Mozart as Wolfi, and Beethoven not even as Ludwig but as Louis(!) as if they were all old high school buddies.  Maybe such sentiments consign me permanently to Old Fogeydom and brand me a snob, but it does seem to me that the use of a first name, let alone its diminutive form, has to be earned, and offered, not unilaterally assumed.

French and German, indeed most other European languages that I am aware of, distinguish between the familiar form of address, tu in French, Du in German and the polite or more formal vous and Sie respectively (as was once the case also in English with the familiar forms, Thee and Thou). One uses the informal pronoun for family, intimate friends, animals, and God and the polite form for everyone else, especially for people older than yourself, whether or not you are acquainted with them, unless or until you have come to a clear agreement to use the familiar form, and usually the initiative for this will come from the older person. Obviously asking, or offering, to use the familiar form may cause temporary discomfort – thus teachers in German-speaking countries at a certain stage will ask their classes whether they want to stay with Du or would prefer to be addressed as Sie – but it does establish what I would term civil distances between people and so at least avoids giving unintentional offence, so that you know where you are with people and don’t take liberties.

When teaching at a German university in the late ‘50s, one of the first things I noticed was students, among themselves, unless they were intimate, always used the Sie form. I was told that this was in reaction to the compulsory Kameradschaft, or comradeship, imposed on everyone during the Nazi period. Having myself been brought up as a member of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who already in the seventeenth century refused to address anyone unknown to them as Mr. or Mrs., but used their first and last names together. I find this a comfortable sort of compromise solution, but maybe that’s just me.

All this raises a bigger issue: the increasing anonymity and depersonalization of our lives in big cities. This is linked directly to the use of language by commercial interests that see us only as customers, consumers, niche markets, and so have a huge financial stake in persuading us to pretend that we are still living in organic little villages where everyone has known everyone else all their lives. Are we really so easily manipulated when a huge glass and steel store calls itself Pottery Barn?  Or when a modern neon-lit fast food restaurant calls itself Pizza Hut?  And why, when we grew up with lofts as places where we dumped rickety old furniture and suitcases crammed with discarded teddy bears and photo albums, would we be tempted to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars for a ‘loft’ in Yaletown? Names like Ye Olde Computer Shoppe – alright, I admit I invented that one – play on our nostalgia for a real or imagined mother country where at least in our dreams and in our touched-up memories we were part of a live, self-contained, bucolic community. Which is why so many urban areas, basically just collections of nondescript streets grouped around a church or a pub, like to call themselves ‘villages.’  So beware the words barn, shack, hut, pantry, and the like!

The downside of democracy is that, in order not to seem uppity, snobbish, hifalutin, etc, we all have to pretend to be more average and just-plain-folksy than we probably are. Thus, although it is perfectly acceptable to admire, even worship, successful athletes, astronauts, film stars, and scientists as part of an elite, woe betide anyone who dares suggest that writers or artists also comprise an elite. Anyone can write, anyone can paint: “why, my five-year-old grandson…” Thus anything your local parish magazine publishes as such, if it rhymes, is ipso facto a poem.  But are seniors really taken in by the fact that many multistorey old peoples’ residences and retirement homes are dignified by such names as Sunset Manor or Daleview Lodge, as if we were all still living the lives of feudal overlords and their retinue? Unfortunately, the answer to these questions is probably ‘yes.’  Were it not so the advertisers and commercial interests that pay them would not continue to play such shabby tricks on us. It is, then, very important to be conscious of the way our actions and attitudes are affected by the specific words with which we allow, not just politicians, but others with vested interests to frame our language for us.

Moving on now from abbreviations to other ways that indicate whether something is a loan word, aside from obvious typological clues such as inverted commas or italic script, an even clearer test might be to see whether the words in question can be used metaphorically in English. Metaphors, after all, by trying to make something clear via analogy, will be effective only if they start from the known, the familiar, in order to illuminate the unfamiliar. There’s little point in comparing someone to a coypu or a wombat if the persons addressed have no idea what such animals look like. On the other hand, if one can speak of a smorgasbord of political approaches or of a tsunami of public protest – both phrases occur in newspaper columns – then clearly the meanings of those two terms are familiar enough to average readers that they can be understood as metaphor. Over the past few years ‘jihad’ has also taken on this metaphorical ability, to stand for religiously and ideologically inspired militant movements, just as for centuries the term crusade, which was medieval Western Europe’s jihad against the ‘infidels’ of the Turkish empire, came to be used for any high octane religious, social, or political cause, doubtless causing as much stress to its non-Christian hearers as the term Jihad now does for us.  Intifada, by contrast, is, at present anyway, too much associated with one particular struggle, that of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, to be useful as a metaphor, so it will remain a foreign word, like Glasnost or Perestroika, whose meaning we recognize but only in a very specific historical context. They are resident aliens.

There are, then, many terms that still strut around in our conversations and newspaper articles with their foreign passports very much on display. But before going into the possible reasons for a foreign term, in this case French, over the native product, let me give you some sense of the vast range of such loan words available in just that one language. The two paragraphs that follow do not come from an actual book or article but are the product of my own fevered imagination, concocted just for fun:

When I was a chauffeur, being a bit of a bon vivant, I was having an amour,

         faute de mieux, with a soigné but rather bourgeoise debutante who was trying

         to make her entrée into haute couture. I had rented a chic deluxe atelier

         opposite the abattoir, complete with douche, bidet, and chaise longue.  My little

         pied-à-terre had a very good ambience, quite comme il faut. The decor was 

         dernier cri, very much en vogue. The owner, to whose largesse I owed our 

         rendezvous, was a déraciné member of the ancien regime and was regarded as

         an enfant terrible by the clique of nouveau riche entrepreneurs who lived in

         that milieu. If they looked at him de haut en bas, he for his part treated them as

         canaille, pur sang.

 

Although his fiancée was my bête noire, I always had a penchant for him.  He 

        exuded a certain je ne sais quoi, a camaraderie, especially vis-à-vis the

        déclassé habituées of the gourmet bistro and patisserie. After some badinage,

        I presented him with a bouquet of immortelles as a corsage to go with the

        trousseau, but the poor man, being no connoisseur, and indeed quite a naive 

        amateur as regards etiquette, was afraid of making a faux pas and felt it was de

        rigeur to leave it behind in a boutique whose cachet was negligées and 

        après-ski outfits. For the owner’s bonhomie and esprit de corps this was the 

        coup de grâce but he received the communiqué of my debacle with insouciant

        sang froid.

That pièce de résistance of mine was a bit outré, a bit de trop no doubt, more a jeu d’esprit than a tour de force.  However, it does make the point that great herds of French words are roaming at large through the English language, often with totally different meanings from those they have in French. Etiquette for instance simply means a label in French. How many of these terms are current also in contemporary US or Canadian, Australian, or New Zealand English?  I don’t know. I simply am not au courant.

The more interesting question is why anyone would want to borrow so many words. I think we can detect at least four reasons. The first is simply for elegant or would-be elegant variation, in order to provide relief from the expected English phrase, the cliché. So, for instance we might want, as I did just now, to say ’de trop’ instead of ‘a bit much’ or ‘over the top.’ Fair enough in small doses but if you start doing this all the time you will soon look affected and dandified.

The second reason in fact is related to this in that it involves the common human weakness of snobbery. Seasoning one’s conversations with a few foreign words, especially French words, is on a par with name-dropping. Especially for anglophones in the US and Canada, states which are not, apart from Quebec perhaps, places known for their linguistic skills, speaking convincingly a few words in another language, is considered a social asset, suggesting a degree of education that adds to one’s prestige, provided of course that the words are used in their correct sense and pronounced accurately. Mispronouncing a foreign word might well expose you to ridicule from the cognoscenti. On the other hand, to pronounce correctly a foreign name that is routinely mispronounced can also be a liability. Because Dutch is one of my languages, I happen to know that the famous Dutch painter should be pronounced not Van Go but Van Gogh, where both the first g and the final gh have the same sound as the ch in the Scottish loch, but to come out with the proper pronunciation anywhere else than among Dutch friends would be considered pretentious. Likewise, when I go to the liquor store, I have trained myself, much as it goes against my linguistic grain, to ask for Lowenbrow not Löwenbräu (pron. lervenbroy), which would not even be understood. So, when buying beer, try to ignore the umlauts and if you speak, say, Bulgarian or Portuguese, conceal the fact except among native speakers of those languages. The main point is to make yourself understood. Language, as we have seen, is a network of conventions: since most people do not like having their conventional assumptions and practices challenged and resent having foreign languages thrust upon them, even innocently bilingual cereal boxes are seen as intrusions rather than as opportunities.

In general, French enjoys a privileged space where the English are concerned, for, however unfairly, not all languages are created equal in this respect, any more than all the names one might wish to drop are equally impressive. French owes part of its prestige (a word which originally meant a trick or an illusion) to the fact that for centuries it was the international language of diplomacy and so enjoyed a long run of upper-class popularity throughout Europe, but especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Russia, as Tolstoy’s novels attest. German, Spanish, and Italian have all at various times been fashionable. Nowadays English enjoys an unparallelled prestige in many countries, which does not of course mean that the English words adopted by France or Italy or Japan are used any more carefully than our borrowings from them. Years ago, a Dutch friend asked in a Dutch clothing store for a sweater. “Sweater? Sweater? Oh, you mean sweeter, madam” the assistant ‘corrected’ her.

But to return specifically to French loan words, a third and obviously crucial reason for using them is that they fill a need by describing an object, a custom, a state of mind, or feeling for which we do not as yet have any word of our own, so that we would have to use longer, more roundabout sentences. I have already instanced l’esprit de l’escalier and manqué. But let’s look at a few more. Faute de mieux, for instance, which means for lack of anything better, or bête noire, someone you can’t stand, your nemesis, or enfant terrible, which is not adequately rendered by ‘terrible kid’ but usefully combines the ideas of a child prodigy, uncontrollable genius, and spoilt brat, say, a combination of Stravinsky, Picasso, and Dylan Thomas. Our language can only benefit by having ready-made, albeit foreign, words available for such phenomena.

The fourth reason for borrowing foreign words in English is probably the most prevalent: euphemism, the act of using words to conceal something unpleasant or disreputable. As children, many of us had the experience of parents or other adults switching to another language to avoid discussing certain matters ‘in front of the children’. So too as adults, when we do not ourselves wish to face certain brutal realities, or wish to spare others discomfort, we often use another language, usually French, in the same way that (as we shall see later when looking at the political use of language) we try to hide from ourselves the fact that ‘friendly fire’, however friendly, still uses bullets that maim or kill allied troops, while collateral damage still means civilians screaming in pain or being burnt alive. Consider some of the terms we have taken over from French and contrast them with their frank, even brutal, English counterparts: abattoir for slaughterhouse, roue for rake, nouveau riche or parvenu for ostentatiously vulgar newly wealthy people, voyeur for peeping tom, souteneur for pimp, liaison for a sexual affair; and madame for the female owner of a brothel, or, if you want to tone that word down a bit too, let’s use the Italian term, bordello. The same of course holds true for a number of Italian terms such as gigolo, vigilante, and more recently paparazzi.  Might there not even be a suggestion that if we can’t come up with our own English terms for certain things and behaviours, they can be discounted and distanced as something that only those awful, unreliable foreigners indulge in?

However, English has taken on a number of words from Italian that do not fall into the category of euphemisms. In fact, in certain areas Italian has cornered the linguistic market, notably music, and to a lesser extent, poetry. Where would English or any Western language be without, for instance, adagio, andante, allegro, alto, aria, basso profondo, belcanto, cadenza, cantata, concerto, contralto, largo, madrigal, opera, pianoforte, piccolo, pizzicato, solo, soprano, staccato, toccata, trio, viola, and dozens of other words?  There are good historical reasons for this: Italy first invented and developed many of the forms of Western music, just as they invented the whole genre of opera, and very few national cultures have even tried to challenge this supremacy. The same is true to a lesser extent with poetry, in words such as stanza, canto, sestina, terza rima, and villanella.

With French and cooking the same point applies a fortiori. Where would Europe’s cuisine be without à la carte, aperitif, chef, table d’hôte, menu, maître d’, grand cru, vignoble, legumes, omelette, pâté, sauté, or sommelier?

To go further would simply make you hungry. I might have added that fencing (épée, en garde, touché), ballet, itself a French term, (pas de deux, pliez, jetée), and painting (aquarelle, bas relief, cire perdue, maquette, nature morte, and vernissage) are also areas of acknowledged French expertise and hence vocabulary, while the same is true of English where sports are concerned. Moreover, as soon as you get into the technicalities of more specialized studies, such as dramaturgy or literary criticism, you are confronted with terms that have been taken over from a foreign language rather than having to invent one of our own. Such is the case with the French terms denouement and the scène à faire, while the German terms Bildungsroman, Kunstlieder, Leitmotif, and Sturm und Drang are usually left untranslated.

The general point is that for perfectly good historical reasons certain nations have excelled in certain areas, so that other languages have had to import almost their entire vocabulary for certain arts, sciences, or skills.

Then too there are many ‘nonce’ words, words that apply to a particular place and time and that usually fade out once those particular times and places have passed or the phenomena they describe no longer exist. Such is the case with Quisling, an infamous Norwegian collaborator with the occupying German forces in war-time Norway. For a while this name became synonymous with traitor but nowadays only someone who had lived through the Second World War would recognize it. To take a few instances from Russian (which due to its cyrillic alphabet we tend to borrow from less often) Soviet will surely last as an historical term simply because, like Victorian, it denotes a political system and a set of attitudes that lasted for more than seventy years. So too, I suspect, will apparatchnik, because the kind of bureaucratic government official it evokes was not alas confined to the former Soviet Union, although the more recent English term ‘technocrat’ covers some of the same ground. But how about Dacha? Most of us recognize the term as the Russian equivalent of ‘cottage,’ a country retreat, but would we ever dream of inviting someone to spend the weekend at our dacha on Pender Island? And what’s to become of samizdat, the illegal printing and distribution of forbidden texts? Finally, is it likely that glasnost and perestroika, terms that referred to the late 1980s when Gorbachev was trying to infuse openness and restructuring into the Soviet system, will be used for later governments’ attempts at clarity and transformation?  They will go the way of Uhuru (Swahili) and Enosis (Cypriot Greek) into the history books and out of the common tongue. And so probably will fatwa and intifada.

But of course not all the loan words come from these major sources. Many more reached us through England’s talent for colonial conquest and commerce.  Thus, from arabic we have a number of al- words, including alcohol, algebra, alcove, and almanac as well as such other basic concepts such as zero, zenith and nadir, sofa and assassin, cipher and calibre.

From one of Britain’s great trading rivals, the Dutch, we have borrowed a number of seafaring terms such as the boom of a ship, skipper, sloop, dock, and yacht as well as furlough and easel, a corruption of the Dutch word ezel, meaning donkey. I only recently realized too that the phrase ‘to warm the cockles of your heart’ (to be heartwarming and endearing) has nothing to do with Molly Malone and shellfish but is derived from the Dutch word ‘kachel,’ a large indoor tiled heating stove or oven.

Until the nineteenth century when, perhaps in part as a result of Queen Victoria’s German relatives, German ideas gained popularity in England, German has not contributed as much to our vocabulary. Beyond those semi-technical terms already mentioned such as Sturm und Drang and Bildungsroman, its main benefit to English has been in terms that sum up concepts that English would otherwise have to describe in much longer phrases. In addition to Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, which I’ve already instanced, there’s also Weltschmerz, (literally, world pain) that very Romantic sense that the whole world is out of joint and is suffering with you, and of course Schadenfreude, which I have seen inadequately rendered as ‘malicious glee’ but which conveys the pleasure one takes in someone else’s misfortunes or discomfort. While this is not a very creditable quality, it is very human so that it is good to have a neat label for it. Then there is Doppelganger, one’s double, Wanderlust (close enough to the English to be self-explanatory) and Fernweh, a longing for distant places, the exact opposite of Heimweh or homesickness, plus two very practical additions to our creature comforts, the first definitely a German invention, Kindergarten, and Delikatessen, or Deli. Words like kitsch and Schmaltz are good to have around too as they help to offset the negative vibes of Anschluss, Blitzkrieg, and Lebensraum. Add in Yiddish, which is a folksy mixture of German, East European languages, and Hebrew, and we get a few more handy concepts such as Chutzpah and Kvetch along with certain habits of speech such as the scornful near repetition of, say, ‘studies, schmudies’ or ‘doctor, schmoctor’ or the for English unidiomatic use of ‘already’ as in Alright already, which is a literal translation of Schon gut! I am more amused than put out by the taking over of the prefix Uber (minus the umlaut) to mean ultra or excessive — have you noticed what a short shelf life most superlatives have? This is perhaps connected to the inflationary hype of advertising that surrounds us 24/7.  One recent borrowing from German word order that I find particularly irritating is the suspension of the negative to the end of the sentence, as in “His was a helpful contribution to the discussion not.” What works fine in standard German sentence structure comes across, to my ears at least, as arch and obtrusive when used in English.

In general, German is mocked for the almost interminable length of some of its noun formations, though this can have its advantages. One of my own favourites, which I encountered decades ago when I was taking driving lessons in Germany, was Theoretischelinksabbieger – literally, a theoretical left turner. This envisages a driver on a main road curving to the right where the driver wishes to go straight ahead onto a minor road and thus although going straight ahead, has to behave, by yielding to oncoming traffic, as if making a left turn. Unlike, say, French, which would have immediate recourse to genitives, English shares this ability but only to a very limited degree: thus we can add bus to station to create bus station or reverse the process for station bus, a bus heading towards the station, likewise with guesthouse and houseguest, but it is built into the syntax of German in such a way that it is very easy and acceptable to create new concepts. Thus in the early nineteenth century German Romantic poets such as Eichendorff were constantly making up words such as Waldfinsternis (roughly, forest darkness) or Abendscheuer (evening horror) that lose most of their resonance when translated.

Contributions from Spanish came about mainly because of the intense rivalry, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, between Spanish and British territorial ambitions in the New World and later because of American acquisition of former Spanish speaking regions such as New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Hence armada (one of the earliest loans), canyon, plaza, and siesta along with a whole host of words ending in -ado or – ada, such as desperado, bravado, aficionado, tornado, and their mildly anglicized versions, ending in -ade, such as esplanade, colonnade, escapade, and renegade.

Thanks to three centuries of British commercial exploitation and military occupation, supplemented more recently by a New Ageist thirst for spiritual enlightenment, the hundreds of languages of India have also furnished our language with a number of useful concepts such as ashram, bungalow (from Bengali), dinghy, dungarees, guru, gymkhana, juggernaut, khaki, loot, mandala, mantra, pariah, pundit, pyjamas, shawl, thug, and veranda.

Other languages have had less lasting impact but I would still feel deprived without such originally Japanese or Chinese terms as kimono, kow-tow, kamikaze, shogun, tycoon, and tsunami. And what would I do without the Scandinavians’ gift of angst, berserk, geyser, ombudsman, maelstrom or the Turkish terms coffee, turban, and kiosk, or, finally, the Polynesian taboo and tattoo?

Which only goes to show that we have to be careful about how we talk to strangers and take the very words out of their mouths: some of their linguistic habits are quite addictive.

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Born in London, England, in 1934, Christopher Levenson came to Canada in 1968 and taught at Carleton University untill 1999. He has also lived and worked in the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and India. The most recent of his many books of poetry is Moorings. He co-founded Arc magazine in 1978 and was its editor for a decade; he was Series Editor of the Harbinger imprint of Carleton University Press, which published exclusively first books of poetry. [Editor’s note: Christopher Levenson contributed a first chapter from his memoir Not One of the Boys and has reviewed books by Kelly Shepherd, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Catherine Owen, Jess Housty, and Susan Musgrave for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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