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West Germans have literally translated American expressions, such as Imgleichen Boot sitzen (to be in the same boat), and Germanized others, such as Beiproduct, brandneu, Eierkopf, Herzattacke, kalter Krieg, (byproduct, brand-new, egghead, heart attack, cold war). They assimilate the unassimilable by total adoption—beatnik, baby sitter, bootlegger, bulldozer, king-size, scooter and stripper. Hundreds of American words have become German Verbs—parken, twisten, hitchhiken. The Luftwaffe fills the air with bilingual babble: "Aber no sweat, boy, no sweat. Ich habe normal letdown procedure gemacht."
Linguistic Sin. French zeal to avoid all this is rooted in feelings of national identity. French until recently was the world's diplomatic language. Only 65 million people now speak it as a first language; less than one-fourth of the U.N.'s 111 member nations still use it in debates. Franglais is spreading so fast, argues Parisian Linguist Alain Guillermou, that U.S. French teachers may soon have nothing to teach. Guillermou calls for a national commission to police Américanolatres on the ground that Franglais is not only a linguistic sin but is also "bad for morals."
Guillermou has a certain point: words are themselves ideas that shape a people's self-image. French purists are thus aghast at the eat-and-run tone of le snack-bar as opposed to the civilized Gallic pace of le cafe. The Franglais word teen-ager is rebellious worlds apart from the dutiful jeune fille. The traitorous notion that "American is the only living language," cries Linguist Etiemble, will lead straight to what he calls, in ironic Franglais, "I' American way of life."
Linguistic Ellis Island. In the 17th century, France "purified" its language, striving for utmost clarity and "incorruptible" syntax. "What is not clear is not French," boasted an 18th century linguist. Etiemble thus argues that Franglais may cause disastrous misunderstandings.
To avoid the worst, Etiemble is preparing a dictionary (Parlez-Vous Franglais?) of French equivalents for Anglicisms. Even where there is none whatever (for Jeep, say), he will insist on French spelling (Jipe). Guillermou is devising a linguistic decompression chamber: a new French glossary with three sections—white pages for acceptable words, red for inadmissible ones, and green pages that "will be a sort of Ellis Island of the French vocabulary. After suitable nationalization, the words may move into the white pages."
Even this seems futile. Language is the greatest smuggling operation in the world. When the French blast juke-box as an American atrocity, for example, they might better blame West Africans for the original Bambara word, dzugu (wicked), which evolved into joog (disorderly) in the Gullah language of sea-island Negroes living off Georgia and South Carolina. It is virtually impossible to keep a language "pure." Mustafa Kemal tried it in Turkey, failed for the simple reason that half the Turkish language is borrowed from Arabic and Persian. Mussolini purged Italian of such "foreign" French (but Latin-derived) words as hotel, menu and chauffeur. His so-called "Italian" substitutes —albergo, lista, autista—come from old German and Greek.