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Anglicisms in world use but not necessarily from the United States also go deep into history. According to Jon Winokur’s 1995 book Je Ne Sais What? such expressions started in 1833 with the naming of Le Jockey Club in Paree. Hundreds of English words have been “borrowed” either intact from English or altered to look French.

GLOBAL ENGLISH MONGRELS

Following are sample words from lishes, the combinations of English and other languages around the world:

Chinglish: t-xue for T-shirt in the Latin alphabet of Mandarin Chinese

Finglish: oh my god, as spoken by the natives of Helsinki

Franglish: les chicken nuggets, usually spoken at the Paris McDonald’s

Hinglish: postwalla for mailman in Hindi in India

Iranglish: elastic loaves, the official term for pizza in Iranian Farsi

Italglish: fastforwardare, a verb heard in Rome along with stoppare

Japlish: sekushii for the English word sexy in Japan

Paklish: bakpaki for a suicide bomber with backpack in Pakistan

Runglish: ized cyawfeh for iced coffee in Moscow

Singlish: dis visiting guy spoken in Singapore

In the “borrowed” category are words that have been imported by the French without change, including the following ones that start with the letter b: bacon, badge, ballast, barman, best seller, bitter, blazer, bluff, bookmaker, boomer, booster, boss, boycott, brainstorm, brain trust, break, budget, bull, bulldozer, bun, bungalow, bunker, bus, and business. In the “altered” category are le vocabulaire and trafic.7

COMPUTER DRIVEN

The main driver of language changes is the personal computer, the marvels of which are now in the hands of an estimated 2 billion people, nearly one-third of the globe’s population.

The computer has shrunken much of the world to a lighted screen that furnishes a common ground for people everywhere to communicate with each other at a faster pace than seems possible. In little more than two decades of mass usage, the device has

destroyed the fax machine and rendered many mailrooms obsolete,

rendered printed dictionaries and language guides almost irrelevant,

nearly eliminated telephone directories and printed maps,

reduced traffic at libraries,

altered commuter traffic because of offices in homes, and

slashed the audience for broadcast and printed news.

This ingenious device has also shown a remarkable ability to affect personal life by making it easier to blame a machine for writing errors, to avoid the trouble of writing personal letters, and to reduce or eliminate child care expenses. The computer also has a few personal downsides, including the ability to

help increase body fat beyond what’s needed to survive the winter,

raise or lower sex drive (usually located next to the hard drive), and

distract workers from doing their jobs.

SPIN-OFFS AND FALLOFFS

At the same time, the computer and its progeny have been undergoing sweeping changes. Not only are they being constantly upgraded and enhanced with new apps (applications), such as constantly available music and weather reports, but they are being reshaped into an amazing collection of spin-offs, including cell (mobile) phones, laptops, netbooks, and assorted “tablets,” like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

Smart phones are essentially pocket computers with as many as 300,000 free or paid apps to choose from along with connections to Facebook, e-mail, texting, music, games, a camera, a calculator, and GPS travel guidance—your keys to the world.

So let us pity William Powers, the author of Hamlet’s Blackberry, who fell off a sailboat with his phone and thereby became “unreachable”—the worst of all predicaments in the computer era—for more than an hour, almost the equivalent of an eon in oldspeak.8

In the equivalent of a millisecond in global history, humans have attained a level of connectivity that could not even be dreamed of a few decades ago, and at speeds equally unimaginable.

But to communicate does not necessarily mean to understand, especially where different languages are involved. Translation can help, but it can be