Survival Arts

Quote of the Day

Though we have many words with Latin roots, English is Germanic in origin. Romance-language speaking peoples conquered England from time to time, and injected our language with a few of those words. As a result the less common “Latin” words spoken by our conquerors were treated as superior to our native language because they were often used by the upper class. The big problem was that these words and sometimes even entire systems of grammar were not used by the majority of people and muddied communication exceedingly when they were used. In my experience, the use of Latin words in the place of simple Anglo-Saxon mono-syllables that mean precisely the same thing usually goes hand in hand with intellectual pretension. Language is a way of bridging the gap between people, so you can probably understand why it bothers me when people do this.

Diane Duncan