http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/11/news/edmoore.html

Meanwhile: The world is Englishing
C.J. Moore International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, April 12, 2005


Alongside the cross-country ski track in this mountain village extends a wide piste where very fit people on long narrow skis pursue an activity known in French as "le skating." Needless to say, like so many –ing words disseminated across the globe, "le skating" bears absolutely no relationship to what is meant in English by the word "skating."

Somewhere in the modern human psyche lies an urge to create trendy and interesting words of this -ing type, in grammatical terms known as gerunds, or verbal nouns. Let's call this creative process "gerunding."

Yes, I know the word gerunding doesn't exist, but since when did such a concern deter those who go gerunding? The whole point is to make up words which sound and look English. It matters not a bit that they are foreign inventions, often unrecognizable to a native English speaker.

Smoking, footing, bronzing, shampooing, pressing, lifting, mobbing, standing - these are just a few of the words that have found their way across Europe in curious distortions of their original sense.

Take the strange history of the word "pressing." In its British context, pressing was a service provided for those who wore a uniform or smart clothing. "Shall I have your trousers pressed, sir?" the butler might say, before going off to see to the damp ironing of the garment.

Building on this association, around the 1930s "un pressing" entered the French language in the sense of a dry-cleaning service, and has remained on the French street ever since - if never in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française.

But nowadays "pressing" has been given a completely new life in soccer commentaries on radio and television around Europe, referring to one team "putting pressure" on the other. The only country where you won't hear such a gerund is Britain.

Where does this kind of neologism come from? And how does it arise and become widespread without any relationship to standard English? By what mysterious process did European properties for sale come to have "standing" - a quality which British English associates with people or institutions, but certainly not with houses or buildings?

Inconsistencies abound. Perfectly good English gerunds like boxing and surfing get ignored in favor of European forms like "boxe" and "surf." Equally strange, the term "sparring" has come to refer not to the activity of sparring but to the sparring partner.

No native English speaker ever went "footing," but this word has been around in Europe since the end of the 19th century when it entered Spanish, for example, in the sense of hiking.

Nowadays it substitutes for "jogging," a word which is often harder for non-native speakers to pronounce.

It must be said that native speakers of English are as guilty as the rest when it comes to gerunding. Grammatically the gerund is a verbal noun; therefore its root should be a verb, as in walking, eating, running and so on.

But in modern (and especially American) English we find an increasing use of gerund-type words generated from nouns, a wrong usage severely frowned upon by purists.

Going beyond Europe, a recent editorial in our own IHT brought to our attention the word "bunkering," a "quaint term Nigerians use to describe outright stealing of crude oil by members of the armed forces or the government" ("Nigeria's dashed hopes," March 8).

Bunkering can hardly be called an English cultural export. But I wonder how long it will be before "beasting" and "monstering" find their way around the world. These unsavory words are slang terms for interrogation methods employed by the U.S. military, made public by court proceedings related to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

What other pleasant cultural exports can we find? I was interested to see the word "bullying" in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, over an article about youngsters being harassed by other children at school. While glossed in the text as "el acoso," a general term for being aggressive, the word "bullying" referred to the emotional and physical variant found widely in the British school environment.

"Why is that in English?" I asked a Spanish friend. The answer came, "We've never needed a word for that before in Spain." Here, as ever, language is our clearest living indicator of social change.

(C.J. Moore is the author of "In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World.’’)