A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. But the fact is that all of us are borrowing from each other, mixing and matching, repurposing for our needs and sometimes getting it a bit wrong. Weird Finnish Phrases that Make No Sense in English Moving to Finland to Study.

It’s easy to be relaxed when yours is the language the rest of the world learns to get ahead. Sometimes they may seem weird and funny to those new to the language. (There are no double entendres in France, where the phrase does not exist or make sense.)Īs English speakers we don’t generally know where our words come from, and probably care even less. And when the British respond to a risqué joke with ‘ooh la la’ there’s a sauciness implied that just isn’t there in the original French words, risqué meaning ‘risked’ (a verb, not an adjective) and oh là là a great many things from ‘wow’ to ‘oh dear’, none of them very sexy. It’s easy to snigger at foreigners and their funny, not-quite-English words – but how many of us realise that our own language contains plenty of the same thing the other way around? Howard Moss points out that “if you ask for a latte in Italy, you’ll get a glass of milk.” Likewise, “ panini means bread rolls in Italian and in its singular form is panino.” So when we ask for ‘two paninis please’, it’s like an Italian requesting ‘ due rollsi’.Īmericans call the main course of their meal the entrée, but in French l’entrée means ‘the entrance’, so it should probably describe the first. It issues warnings and edicts against anglicisms for which perfectly good French words exist, and lately its website has cautioned against fan zone and listing – though it accepts building for skyscraper and Browning for handgun as legitimate French words of English origin. It is the final arbiter of the language and a watchdog against its abuse. In France the Académie Française is an important body in public life. These are all good fun – but for some people, the creep of English words into foreign languages is a serious business and cause for concern, whether those words mean the same thing in English or not.

A purveyor of adult entertainments is a sexy shop. (Put your foot down too much on the Autostrada, and you’ll certainly learn a lesson.) Hiring temporary staff in the IT sector is called body rental. A speed camera is known colloquially as a tutor. There are plenty more colourful ones in Italian. “You know what it means, clearly, but it’s being used slightly differently,” says Moss. Or take the example of an express train, which can be described as running no-stop, from the English ‘non-stop’.

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