TechnoChitlins

The one French word is-

Stephen Green posts a letter he received here that, I think, speaks for itself- bq. I can’t find the link to today’s Good Weekend (the colour supplement to the Sydney Morning Herald) , but there’s a feature by Melvyn Bragg about the persistence and penetration of English. Opening Para: “Like Henry V and Elizabeth I, Winston Churchill, at a time of great peril to England, addressed the moment in the country’s ancestral tongue. In 1940 he told apprehensive Britons “We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them in the fields and in the streets, shall fight in the hills: we shall never surrender”. Every word is Old English save one: ‘surrender’ is French.” This needs to be everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Yes it does. Posted by maestro at November 25, 2003 02:58 PM | TrackBack