I’m a linguistics geek.<\/p>\n
You’ve been warned.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
Languages borrow from and give back to each other in a constant ebb and flow of words and ideas that, often as not, reflect cultural shifts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
English is, of course, a language made up of borrowed words.\u00a0 It’s really a hash arising from the collision of two linguistic families – Anglo-Saxon languages descended from German and Dutch, and romance influences descended from the Norman conquest of Britain.\u00a0 And American English is even more so – a melange of immigrant dialects (the southern drawl is a descendant of the Scots-Irish brogue the south’s original inhabitants brought over; the various New York and Boston dialects are combinations of Northern, Eastern and Southern European accents).<\/p>\n
Of course, the booming success of American pop culture has meant that American English has given back to the world; the ascendancy and dominance of Americana has led to American-English words popping up in languages all over the world; “Okay” is found in a great many of the world’s languages, and considered perfectly acceptable usage,\u00a0to denote that something is “Okay”; Japanese absorbed “Besoboru” and “Aisukurima” and “Disokujokii” for Baseball, Ice Cream and Disc Jockey, among many others.\u00a0 This has led some nations – mainly France – to try to plug the hole in the cultural, linguistic dijk (there’s another!) to try, in vain, to “preserve” their language in its “pure” form.<\/p>\n
Of course, American English has borrowed much in return, not just from immigration,\u00a0but from\u00a0its expansionist past\u00a0– everything from “Boondocks” (from the Tagalog bundok, <\/em>or “mountains”, brought back in the early 1900’s from the Philippines by US servicemen) to “pow-wow”, to “Jazz” among many, many others terms derived from the argot of Afro-American slaves.\u00a0<\/p>\n So it’s always interesting to watch new words getting borrowed.\u00a0<\/p>\n I started noticing the prefix “\u00fcber-” popping up in my kids’ conversation four or five years ago; it is (says the guy with the undergrad German minor) a German modifying prefix meaning, roughly, “Super”.\u00a0 “That was \u00fcber<\/em>cool!” became a common expression among the local Twilight<\/em>-‘n-Jonas-Bros set.<\/p>\n Then, last fall, I heard it in a TV commercial for the first time, as I wrote in a piece I never got around to posting.\u00a0 Which, as it turns out, is a good thing, since the piece has apparently taken the next step.\u00a0<\/p>\n What the “next step” exactly is<\/em>, of course, is a matter for debate; it might be “on the brink of entry into the AP Style Guide”, or it might be “further proof of the decline of Journalism”.<\/p>\n Via Allahpundit, you be the judge<\/a>:<\/p>\n With apologies to D.L. Hughley<\/a>, it\u2019s The One\u2019s \u201cStefan Urquelle\u201d<\/a> moment.<\/p>\n …The president-elect, looking uber-cool<\/strong>\u00a0 <\/em>[sic] with his White Sox baseball cap on backwards, flipped the shaka to a crowd of about 30 people as he left a gym on a Marine Corps base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is vacationing.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n AP goes on to ask:\u00a0<\/p>\n Does he really need the hat to attain uber-coolness [sic]? Being married to a \u201cgoddess\u201d<\/a> should be enough. And hey, nothing says I’d be the last one to judge fashions, \u00fcber-or-unter cool.\u00a0<\/p>\n But borrowing superlative modifiers from Germans?\u00a0 The idea so \u00fcber-fills me with angst, I’m verklemmt.<\/p>\n UPDATE: Vi\u00e4 H\u00e4sslingt\u00f6n, I see I’ve f\u00f6rg\u00f6tten cert\u00e4in\u00a0r\u00fcles ab\u00f6\u00fct \u00fcml\u00e4ute<\/em>…<\/p>\n UPDATE 2:\u00a0 Unless you are a highly-trained speaker of German or Finnish, do not <\/em>try to pronounce all the words in the previous update correctly.\u00a0 You could sprain your tongue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m a linguistics geek. You’ve been warned. ———- Languages borrow from and give back to each other in a constant ebb and flow of words and ideas that, often as not, reflect cultural shifts.\u00a0 English is, of course, a language made up of borrowed words.\u00a0 It’s really a hash arising from the collision of two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}creepy<\/s> hip<\/a> like a president who hits the gym every morning. Exit question: What other fashion conventions that have been passe for, oh, at least 20 years are we about to learn are \u201cuber-cool\u201d? [sic]\u00a0\u00a0Obama should start wearing skinny ties just to dare the press to call him outmoded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n