In the aviary of languages, English is a jackdaw or a magpie, a bird that steals widely and insouciantly. Grammarians call this readiness to pinch foreign words ‘borrowing’, but it’s not the kind encouraged by your bank. True, the purloining of words deprives no other language of its inventions but, even so, no interest is paid and no capital returned.
Little exemplifies the klepto-characteristics of English so well as