Word of the Day: Loanword
They call it a loanword, but really, it’s stolen.
We’re all thieves. Yep, that’s right.
If you can read this, I’m happy to tell you that you’re a thief too.
If you speak English, you are one of the biggest thieves in the whole world.
As an English language teacher, I am training you on how to be a thief.
The Cambridge online dictionary defines a loanword as “a word taken from one language and used in another.”
Notice it doesn’t say borrowed.
It says taken.
I want to clarify it a little more and say that a stolen loanword is also not modified very much.
Let’s imagine you had sushi and a beer last night for supper.
Then as dessert, you ate a few chocolates.
Just a few because I don’t want to make you fat.
Let’s start with the word ‘sushi,’ a loanword from Japanese, and it’s precisely as the Japanese say it. Verdict: stolen.
Next, the beer must have had alcohol in it because I can’t imagine you drinking beer with no alcohol. I mean, what’s the point?
Anyways, alcohol comes from the Arabic word al-Kuhl.
It looks similar and sounds similar.
I’m going to put it down as a stolen loanword.
Are you starting to feel bad?
Do you feel like a thief?
Don’t worry.
I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me.
After washing down the stolen sushi with the stolen alcohol, it’s wise to get rid of the evidence.
It was time for dessert.
Oh, wait a minute, the English word ‘dessert’ looks like the French word desservir.
Dessert, desservir hmmm.
They look similar.
Though not technically a loanword, you could be arrested for less.
Oh yeah, we can’t forget the chocolate.
Actually, we love chocolate so much that we stole that too.
Europeans took it from the Aztecs.
The Aztecs called it xocoatl.
This one is highly modified, but I think the Europeans were embarrassed about stealing it, so they tried to disguise it.
I’m pretty sure it still qualifies as a loanword, though.
Every time you speak English, you are using someone else’s words.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 80.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.