He’s a dark horse, isn’t he?
How would you describe the expression a dark horse to somebody who’d never heard it before? After thinking for a moment, you might say it’s a person of hidden depths or secret talents/opinions, someone who achieves something when no-one expected that they might. You might give an example of a quiet student in a language class who suddenly speaks confidently and fluently in an oral exam.
Writing about the four humours yesterday, something struck me: the word humorous isn’t really very humorous.
Are you in good humour at the moment? You are? Good! If I’d asked you that question a few hundred years ago though, it would’ve had a somewhat different meaning.
There may be one advantage to Donald Trump being President of the United States (only one!), though it’s quite a selfish one: he certainly gives me a lot of food for thought. Sometimes I really don’t want to write about him, or even think about him, or exist in the same universe as him, but he can be hard to ignore, particularly when he demonstrates his unusually dysfunctional relationship with the English language.
Last week he gave us another addition to the evergrowing list of did-he-actually-just-say-that? moments:
I’ve mentioned before how I prefer, while living in Belgium, to watch English-language films in English with French and Dutch subtitles, though that’s not always easily available.
I also mentioned recently that I was going to see Blade Runner 2049 (which is good, but could never be as good as the first film). One of the advantages of watching films with subtitles is that it reveals interesting differences between the two or three languages involved, or gives you interesting translation choices to ponder.
I think it’s only fair, after looking at the way the French language uses pseudo-anglicisms (a lovely term I came across earlier), it’s only fair that I take a corresponding look at foreign words we use in English, and how their use is different from in their original language. Unsurprisingly, we use a lot of foreign terms, and with most English speakers being monolingual, we don’t always use them as they were originally intended.
English-Language Thoughts 