As an editor of a Berlin English-language monthly, Alexander Wells beautifully observes how, due to increasing globalism, language and usage are in a perpetual state of metamorphosis.
My favourite kind of anglicism is the Scheinanglizismus. Many languages across the world have these « pseudo-anglicisms », which consist of English phrases that are used in that language but don’t actually make sense in English. An overhead projector is called a Beamer here; a photo shoot is, rather alarmingly, a Shooting. During lockdown, the practice of working from home got dubbed das Homeoffice, much to the bafflement of Berlin’s UK contingent. A male model used to be called a Dressman, in a doublepseudo- anglicism: it’s the English verb « dress » tacked onto the elegant rump of « gentleman ». Best of all were short-lived attempts to market the messenger satchel to Germans as Bodybag.
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