{"id":1437,"date":"2013-09-20T19:42:29","date_gmt":"2013-09-20T19:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=1437"},"modified":"2014-10-17T15:27:37","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T15:27:37","slug":"non-english-english-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=1437","title":{"rendered":"Non-English English (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is an interesting document called A Brief List of Misused English Terms in EU Publications<\/a>, which lists a mixture of quasi-English Eurocrat terms of art and commonly used English expressions that no native speaker would use.<\/p>\n

This includes a number of perfectly reasonable variant usages of the English language which have a particular connotation (e.g. “adequate”, which tends to be used in native English to mean “just about okay” rather than “matching all requirements”; “Anglo-Saxon”, which has a rather pejorative sense in native English); words that have a fairly general meaning (like “agent”) which are only really used in a small number of contexts (“secret agent”, “newsagent”—a joke which my friend Matthew Jarron dined out on for years<\/a>; “aids” which are only helpful inanimate objects and not helpful people or actions); grammatical formations (like “planification” and “to precise”) that could exist in English but don’t; words that sound as if they could be English but aren’t (“fiche”); and, truly sui generis<\/em> examples like “comitology” for “committee practice”.<\/p>\n

It is interesting to note such examples from day-to-day usage too. That is, not one person’s random misunderstanding, but expressions that are part of a “European English”. For example, in travelling around Europe and speaking to non-native speakers, I frequently come across the following:<\/p>\n