Just saw a nice piece in the Economist about the use of borrowed words and phrases from other languages: when to translate? When not to translate?
There's also a silly piece in the Telegraph about the words that didn't make it into the OED but sit, rejected, in a vault somewhere slowly sliding into obsolescence - or not? The 'nudenda' and the 'nonversation' may never make it out of the vault, but I'd like to put in a good word for 'freegans' and for 'earworms'. I got an earworm only just the other day. What did we call it, anyway, when we heard a song without noticing on the radio and then went around singing it all day? If anybody can think of a better word for it than earworm I will be very surprised.
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