The word impossible is not French.
An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language from other languages they've read. I am a big-time reader, but I mix and match.
Words borrowed of Antiquity do lend a kind of Majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes. For they have the authority of years, and out of their intermission do win to themselves a kind of grace-like newness. But the eldest of the present, and newest of the past Language, is the best.
In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid not in Dutch alone - its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism.
English has borrowed from everywhere and now goes everywhere.
The words you can't find, you borrow.
Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them.
The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.
Funny how words in one language get used in another language. For example, 'scotch' in Russian is tape and 'pampers' means diapers.
I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.
I have an old soul. I don't know any real-life lingo, so I have to take it from movies.
English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.
Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.
We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner.
The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.
I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language.
Every language has influences and is an influence.
Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that.
We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
English is full of Scandinavian words. Margate, Ramsgate, Billingsgate, any town with a 'gate' on it takes their suffix from the Danish word 'gade' which simply means 'street.'
You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.
