OP makes the usual fallacy: those are NOT English words, but Swiss German ones, even if they look like English ones. It's the fate of loan words. French people don't get upset because their words become quite different meaning in English. So calm down and read about semantics of loan words in the nearest university library.
I watched an episode of the great English bake off on the BBC yesterday and they used so many French terms that I was wondering if I had the right channel... it is a bit bizarre for me if an Englishman of all people complains about loaned words.
Lonsdale has a different brand image in the German speaking world than it has in the UK:
"In the early 2000s, Lonsdale clothing became popular among some European neo-Nazis, allegedly because a carefully placed outer jacket leaves only the letters NSDA showing; one letter short of NSDAP, the acronym for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the German name of the Nazi Party. Wearing a brand with no Nazi links in order to express Nazi sympathies helped bypass strict laws concerning the public display of Nazi symbolism. In the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France and Germany, the term Lonsdale youth became widely used to describe teenagers with far right tendencies, and the brand was banned from certain schools in the Netherlands and Germany"
Forget the thug life shirts. Look at the "Compton" baseball caps. If one of those Swiss kids actually went to Compton wearing that, they'd be lucky to make it out alive!!
According to my Aussie english teacher mate, inserting foreign words into a sentence is a well-documented linguistic phenomeon known as code-switching. I find I do it a lot with my English-speaking friends; we'd often arrange to meet at the Treffpunkt at the Bahnhof, for example. Having said that, we've all been here almost 20 years, so it would just feel odd to say we'll meet at the meeting point at the station.
To a large degree, I agree with you on this, but on another hand, many times people do this "code-switching" because of laziness. It's so much easier to say the word in whatever language comes to mind (often English for non-English-speakers) than to make the effort to think about it and come up with the correct term in their own language. I grew up with three languages and my parents made sure that I made the effort to know a certain word in a certain language to not mix the languages up because of comfort or laziness. It paid off at university and in work life.
Hmmm. I grew up with one language only and as a teenager started to use as many English terms as possible. Fortunately did we not have German MTV yet, so I learned from people like Ray Cokes who were way better at English than my teachers. Watching MTV and playing Amiga games in English paid of in my work life (and taught me what a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle is good for.)
Such euro whining. Eminem spawned an entire generation of white, privileged kids around the world to wear jeans falling off the arsecrack, backwards caps and a dialect best left in Detroit. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of being a Yank in another country being bitched at for being a terrible Yank by a punk in some form of American pop culture and converse high tops.
Kids, they love to be ironic. I love the term 'swizzlers' though...giggled through the entire thread.
Most English words are borrowed- from the Celts, the old Britons and Norse, Anglo-Saxon (Germans), Danish or Norwegian, Norman FRench, Latin- and many more ... it is the wonderful mix which makes it so great I actually really like those which come from even more exotic sources than the above, here are just a few examples :
Arabic
zero, algebra, candy, ghoul
Algonquian (Native American)
woodchuck
Australian aborigine
boomerang, kangaroo
Chinese
ketchup, typhoon, wok
Gaelic (Irish)
galore, hooligan, whiskey
Hindi
swastika, khaki, pajamas
Italian
bizarre, spaghetti, soprano
Nahuatl (Aztec)
tomato, chocolate
.... anorak from the eskimos, yogurt from the berbers- etc, the list is endless...
