re: #371 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

Most languages don’t borrow a new word for every little nuance of meaning, the way English does. as Mark Twain said:

ours is a mongrel language which started with a child’s vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime.

Yes, I read a description of how English does not so much borrow words from other languages as it chases them down a dark alley, beats them up and rifles their pockets