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  • Going native: Brexit prompts linguistic cleansing

    1945 British Passport, with royal seal

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lucienlewen@gmail.com Aug 21, 2016 5:31 am

The most interesting thing in this article, is certainly not what the author intended to say, but its tragicomic underlying reality: a linguistic Βατραχομυομαχία - silly, rough, pre-modern and jingoistic - currently going on in a retrogressive Europe. Let me point out just the quintessential frivolousness at the very beginning: " Brexit is an English word "!

Reply to lucienlewen@gmail.com at 5:31 am
michael.graubart7@gmail.com Aug 21, 2016 9:40 am

It never occurred to me that, along with an increase in racially-inspired hate crimes and economic decline, that disastrous Brexit vote would lead to linguistic 'purification'! In 1938 my parents and I were refugees to England from Austria. But one non-Jewish relative by marriage stayed in Austria and supported the Nazi 'purification' of the German language, the replacement of words with Latin and other foreign roots by invented ones with Germanc ones, until one day she discovered that her perfumerie had become a Duftladen — a scent-stall! What will become of our culture, our literature and our civilization if that kind of thing happens to English?

Reply to michael.graubart7@gmail.com at 9:40 am
simonk39@mac.com Aug 21, 2016 11:16 am

I needed the laugh that this piece gave me as I am still rather fed up about brexit and the subsequent blaming of Jeremy Corbin rather than Boris Johnson and more especially David Cameron who had no mandate to put the referendum in place, no cabinet approval and insisted on heading the Remain campaign himself and did it so incompetently, plus the right-wing media.  This comment is becoming a rant, so I'll stop.

Reply to simonk39@mac.com at 11:16 am