h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If I'm going to annoy anyone, I'd rather do it with utter nonsense, preferably based on foreign language words.

Four out of seven for me. Highly sus.

Rhyming works as well to annoy. That should be no problem for you, Paul..

We also have that in Dutch, but some combinations give questionable results. For example: 'Vet lauw' used to be a popular phrasing for something you really liked. In the real world, vet means fat (either large, greasy or both at the same time) and lauw means tepid. Ordering a 'vet lauw' beer made sure it went out of fashion quite quickly.

Where I live the prefix Kei- makes everything more outspoken (a 'kei' is a rock or boulder), as in keigoed (really good) keihard (really loud/fast/hard) but also keizacht (really/soft, despite experience that rocks are not really soft), keilekker (delicious, despite the lack of nutritional value of rocks).
The other day I saw a van marked 'Keiretsu' so I thought that would be really retsu. Turned out that was meant to be Japanese for a group of collaborating companies.

Thanks for the rundown of Dutch newspeak!

That is interesting about the newly-added words in the dictionary.

I know zhuzh because of its origins in Polari - it features on RuPaul's Drag Race, for example.

Sus is a word my family use a lot - suspect or suspicious

I've seen 'rent-free' around on social media - an evocative expression

I've not seen 'nepo baby' used, but that makes sense. Not seen yeet, either - can't guess how that one came about. Someone used 'lit' because her daughter was using it She didn't say what her daughter thought of that!

That's the way - I applaud this person for her activism in moving the language forward.

This has been going on for a long time. As a teenager in the 1960s, I knew a word was past its sell-by date once my mother picked it up. Just as when my dad came home with a 'new' joke, it had been circulating for at least six months.

I usually heard the jokes first from my baby sister's friends in the third grade.

Thanks for the UK report! We may be able to map expression migration of this world language!

I hear Yeet! a lot in a gaming context.

My current crusade is to clean up the Dutch grammar of my kids. My daughter is planning to study to be a teacher. Failing the test in Dutch language at the end of the first year means you have to stop. She has some rather persistent Anglicisms... (incorrect word order and excess words in Dutch sentences) and use of English words because she doesn't know the word in Dutch.

Yeet crops up in crossword puzzles. "Retsu" is one I had seen in Japanese references..

I can see how the pervasiveness of English could be affecting other languages in Europe, Caiman - particularly German and Dutch. We do this to each other all the time, but in English it just leads to nonsense like people thinking 'a la mode' means 'with ice cream on it'.

I remember talking to a city official in Gotha, Germany on the phone, sometime in the early 90s. I needed some information for the college to plan a study trip.

'Ich werde es faxen,' she offered. 'Haben Sie die Faxnummer?'

I mentally noted that 'faxen' was now a verb and moved on.

15 years before I had asked a friend, ''Der, die, oder das' Ketchup?'

So good luck - fight the good fight and keep English from interfering with the Dutch language, which is a rare and beautiful tongue and NOT as the Germans claim 'eine Halskrankheit'.

I blame the fanfic my kids are constantly reading on their smartphones, although I recognise the fact that some English words have no 100% fitting Dutch equivalent. (My wife doesn't understand you can know the meaning of a foreign word without knowing the Dutch word. The thing is, my brain also switches to English, so it doesn't need to know the Dutch word)

I know what you mean. I have caught myself going, 'You know...ack, what's the word for this in English?' and instead coming up with the word in German or Greek or whatever.

It's an artefact of thinking in whatever language you're using instead of translating in your head. I think it's a good thing.

My Yiddish professor at the University of Pittsburgh complained about people who spoke Yiddish with too many English words in. I thought of her the other night. We were watching the film 'The Cobbler', and the opening scene was in Yiddish. They used WAY too many English words in there, like 'customer'. I suspect all the actors in that scene really spoke Yiddish at home with the old folks.