Words, Words, Words

"Words, words, words." Millennials may not recognize the quotation from Hamlet. ("So many one-liners!" my husband, self-educated until later in life, exclaimed in pleased recognition the first time I took him to see the Olivier movie.) But words are alive and well in the twenty-first century, although they've had to perform some bizarre contortions in order to survive. A couple of topics on the subject have been kicking around in my mind for a long time. I'm putting them together to offer to you today.

First, the unnecessary new locution to replace a perfectly serviceable one.
tasked with for being assigned, ordered, told to do something, or having a job
going forward for from now on
gifted with for given, esp a gift or present
curated for picked, chosen, or selected
role for job or position

Example: In her role of assistant office manager, Eloise was tasked with gifting everyone with a personally curated token of their birthdays and promotions going forward.

Anachronistic example (alas, they exist in today's historical fiction): "Soldiers of the legion!" the centurion said. "Going forward, you will be tasked with representing Rome at all times. I am gifting each of you with a pilum and gladius to kill the enemy, a shield to defend yourself, and a shovel curated by the camp prefect to dig a latrine every time we make camp."

Now let's move on to my second topic, this one not a peeve but an object of fascination: the expansion of the English language around the globe, definitively replacing French at the twenty-first century lingua franca, as it were. How do I know this is so? By watching TV via streaming services in a multitude of languages—with subtitles, on my laptop, in my own home. It's become one of my great pleasures, along with reading, for an evening's relaxation.

I started with French crime shows, such as Candice Renoir, Astrid, and Lupin, since I'm fluent in French and need only a glance at the subtitles now and then to keep up, though I'm glad they're there. I noticed immediately that Candice and her colleagues in Sète in southwestern France, who are very slangy, and Lupin, who's in Paris but very "street," since he's a gentleman crook, use such terms as le blackmail and le kidnapping, even though there are perfectly good French words for both: le chantage for blackmail and l'enlèvement for kidnapping. Astrid, who's neurodivergent and very formal—she won't even tutoyer her best friend, police detective Raphaelle—doesn't take these handy shortcuts. Raphaelle and her Parisian police colleagues speak a classier, more careful French too, though they've been known to say a potential suspect is clean after doing a background check.

Since then, I've watched multiple shows, mostly police procedurals or political thrillers, in Danish, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Dutch, Luxembourgeois (in which the characters occasionally spoke four languages within a single sentence), and others, and in every one, the dialogue was heavily larded with English, even when the characters were not, as they sometimes were, communicating in English in order to speak with native speakers of a language other than their own. As you must know, the English word, an Americanism, that's become most universal is a simple okay. The same for cool. But some others are also popular, and some, as used in certain countries, are just plain fun.

sorry seems to be used universally in German and Finnish
thank you used interchangeably with other languages; everyone understands it
Christmas Korean for Christmas
shopping Korean for shopping
marketing Korean for marketing, as far as I can tell
spindoctor Danish for speechwriter, publicist, or political official's communications director


On Dicte, about a Danish police reporter, I caught safe house and network but was too absorbed in the show to write down others that I heard.

And on Luna and Sophie, my favorite German show, about two delightful police detectives in Potsdam, I managed to get a whole list:
control freak
spooky
blackout
end of story
nice try
shit happens
one stop shop
And there was one proverb I loved. Luna used it to turn down a new colleague who asked her out for a drink after work.
"Schnapps ist schnapps und job ist job."

In fact, so deeply has English sunk in its hooks that the German dictionary lists "job" as a synonym for arbeit (work), saying it's used umgachschpratlich (colloquially). With words like that, the most dedicated English language chauvinist surely doesn't want German and other languages to die away altogether.