Ticker-tape

…although the link between jousting and Rishi Dastidar’s Ticker-tape seems at first to be a stretch, it is there, in the whole notion of a book launch where you hurl a book, throw it high in the air, its arc curving under the nostrils of a hungry public.  The action is no less than a spear thrust, which is the origin of the word launch, coming as it does from Middle English launche, and Anglo-French lancher, and Late Latin lanceāre meaning to wield a lance.  To be liberated with your lance, be a free lance, or a sprightly lance, or a totally crowd-clearing lance depends entirely on how you want to work these days - whether you take your lance with you on the Tube, or into the 5 pm gridlock, or over the soggy moors at night.  And if you lance frequently, lance a lot, in fact, then you are turning into something knightly, courtly, a bit cavalier perhaps, which etymologically speaking means you must be travelling with a horse.  And then we have to get into cavalcades, parades of horses, even a ticker-tape parade where (if you are lucky) paper, words, and poems rain down on your head. 

All of which means I’m hugely looking forward to this evening’s launch of Ticker-tape in Waterstones, Piccadilly, London.

Mantel

This time of year my thoughts always turn to Spain.  From a notebook dated 2010:

At the bus station café in Malaga, the waiter is running a tight ship, persuading and cajoling all ditherers at the door to sit down at a table even before they have time to get their bearings.  This way there is no dilly-dallying at the counter over the cheaper fare, but an orchestrated segue into the more serious part of the establishment.

Middle-aged with a small paunch, the waiter busies himself constantly - wiping tables, taking orders, clearing crockery, and directing with aplomb the not-so-sure hovering at the entrance.  He stretches a friendly but authoritative hand to my shoulder, and I am clinched.

After taking my order for tortilla, he flourishes a paper tablecloth to cover the perfectly serviceable, perfectly wipeable melamine table to indicate that here, unlike those feebly ordering only a cup of coffee, is a customer who has squared up to the menu and is ready to dine.  I sit prepared for his next move, perhaps to tie a napkin around my neck.

‘¿Cómo se llama en español?’ I ask, motioning to the tablecloth.  I’ve forgotten what it’s called, but offer up the word napa, a ridiculous cheatling I’ve concocted from the French nappe.

He looks at me quizzically.   ‘Es un mantel,’ he says.  Then: ‘De donde es usted?’  Where are you from?

‘De Inglaterra,’ I answer.  

He nods, slowly, sympathetically, in recognition of the misfortune it must be to hail from a land in which the art of covering café tables with paper tablecloths has all but disappeared.

A Coat, a Wig and a Roving Star

Having being born the day before the traditional Epiphany, squeaking in just before the Twelve Days of Christmas are officially over, I’ve grown up being aware of stars and wise men out wandering.

And while I can imagine The Magi at this time of year on their singular journey, busy looking towards the heavens, my own eyes seem to be more firmly on the ground tracking wise men.  Any wise man or woman.  The kind of person on whose door you can rap, who will invite you in, speak in riddles you must untangle, ladle out warming broth, sit and listen to your woes, dust you down, then set you back on course, clearer and more focused.  

I realise that wise people rarely heave into view looking like Gandalf and more often come across your path heavily disguised – often in the garb of a person you’re too instantly prepared to dismiss.  I thought of one yesterday as I was cleaning the bathroom for visitors.  In fact, I think of him every single time I wipe down a basin, and hear his voice saying: immer fliessend, Katie, immer fliessend.  He was a barrel-bellied Croatian gastarbeiter in the Hansa Hotel in Wiesbaden, where I was a chambermaid for the summer I was nineteen, and he taught me everything I now know about turning round a bathroom in minutes – especially, although not necessarily economically, by keeping the water continually running while swooshing around the taps with a cloth.  His words, which were originally meant simply to communicate a knack, have transformed over time into a nugget of wisdom,  and the instructions immer fliessend, meaning always flowing, have become a mantra in my head, not just about water in a basin, but about a way of living that aspires to be easy and fluid rather than rigid and stuck.  

Yet I am still drawn to the notion of a wise and wondrous magical character, stepping out of the gloom attired in home-spun but mystic raiments.  As you can see in the photo above, I’ve laid out his/her coat in readiness (a Kashmiri embroidered dressing gown that my mother brought back from India when she was twenty-seven) and I've provided a flowing mane of hair and a hat graced with the proverbial star.  We used these props in a recent You Tube release of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star reworked by the A Woman in Goggles band.

For this traditional song of looking, wondering and seeking is nothing if not a song for Epiphany.  

And the pictured clothes are waiting to be inhabited and spring to life.

   

Kicking the Tooth Fairy into Touch

I’ve spent the entirety of this past week needing cold compresses to the forehead, handfuls of smelling salts and hourly nips of quote unquote ‘lavender’ water.

Life used to be blissfully ordinary. 

But then, nine days ago, I happened upon a You Tube clip in which Paul Hellyer, whom I remember from my Canadian childhood as being the Minister of Defence and best known for unifying the Canadian Armed Forces, was calmly reporting to an American committee entitled the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure.   

He was talking about UFOs.  And these were his words:  ‘UFOs are as real as the airplanes flying overhead.’  Then, to a ripple of applause from the assembly, he continued by saying that he was ‘the first person of cabinet rank in the G8 group of countries to say so unequivocally.’ 

The Citizens Hearing he was reporting to is part of the larger ‘Disclosure Project’ which is described on its own website as: ‘a research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. [It has] over 500 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first-hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.’

As one of those 500 people testifying, Paul Hellyer continued with assertions including:

• At least four species of aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years
• Live ETs are on Earth right now, at least two working with the US government
• Places they come from include Zeta Reticuli, the Pleiades, Orion, and Andromeda
• This information is known to a kind of cabal consisting of select members of military and intelligence organisations, the international banking cartel and oil cartel, who effectively operate as a kind of shadow government…
• …and therefore accountable to no one 

Somewhat shaken not so much by his (often second-hand) testimony but other witnesses I subsequently  watched, I then proceeded to lose uncountable hours glued to You Tube clips of UFOs – many looking suspiciously like Chinese lanterns, or home-made zeppelins, others like that shred of plastic debris that’s just blown out of the garden shed and annoyingly taken to the air.  Some have been filmed by shaky hands against nothing but non-descript sky that gives the object no hint of dimension, height from ground, or speed. 

But then there is genuinely astonishing footage (with predictable disembodied soundtrack: ‘What IS that?’)

So, dear reader, I am freaked out.  

And in processing and sifting through all this gigantic, mind-boggling - one could say Earth-shattering – stuff, I keep thinking about a sentence uttered by Paul Hellyer.

‘Just as children survive the idea of the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus when they become adult,’ he said, ‘I think that tax-paying citizens are quite capable of accepting the new and broader reality: that we live in a cosmos teeming with life of various sorts.’ 

You see, I think he got the analogy twisted.  Yes, I know he was trying to say that we need to grow up, get real, lose our childish illusions.  But surely he was asking us to go in reverse - to allow, in fact, not just the possibility of Saint Nick, the Tooth Fairy, the Loch Ness Monster, the leprechaun under the privet hedge, but also those little green men in flying saucers that we’ve all grown up drawing pictures of.

Who are apparently, according to P. Hellyer, white.  Tall and white and, incidentally, with a lifespan of  700-800 years.

A Hatching

You can read this blog on the Mslexia website.

A Reason to Rhyme

You can read this blog on the Mslexia website.

David Bowie and the Art of Furniture Removal

You can read this blog on the Mslexia website.

Something Fishy About Sin....

...something sinful about fish

On my recent visit to Spain, aboard the bus from Malaga to Orgiva, a well-dressed  and impeccably coiffed lady sat down beside me.   She began a friendly conversation about where she was going for the weekend, where she lived – look, just over there in that smart neighbourhood, that very apartment building, a few tens of metres from the sea.

And then, fifteen minutes further into our journey, she pointed out of the window and began to talk about sin. 

Now this was a surprising turn, given the run-of-the-mill nature of everything thus far.  Why the sudden lurch into sin?  What would come next?  A scouring stare?  A toe-curling confession?   I coughed and played for time.  She pointed again towards the village we were passing through, with its whitewashed houses clustering around the shore. 

And then I got it.  Fish.  She was talking about fish.

The Spanish word for fish is pescado.  But drop the “s” –  and you are left with pecado, meaning "sin". 

But why on earth would anyone want to drop the “s” in the first place?  Indeed.  This is the constant cry as you travel around Andalucia and come to realise that  “s” has been hounded to the verge of extinction.  The southern Spaniards have charmingly seen fit to extract “s”s  from the middle and ends of their words with the diligence of dentists.

So pescado is pronounced pecado.  Buenos días becomes bueno día.  Despues (meaning “after”) becomes de-pue.  And so on.

(To give you a hint of what it’s like trying to keep abreast of things during a haemorrhage of this vital consonant, try saying the following sentence, as quickly as you can, without any of the "s"s:  “Let’s eat goose this Christmas”.   And see if anyone can understand you.)

Of course, context becomes vital.  It was perhaps idiotic to be travelling through a fishing village assuming my bus companion was prattling on about sin, when clearly the nets and boats should have given the game away.  But it is  intriguing how dangerously close are sin and fish in a couple of other languages.  An Italian fisherman, pescatore, could easily turn, with an injudicious tongue slip, into a sinner, peccatore.  A Frenchman who goes fishing, pêcher, is homophonically embracing sin, péché.  And, depending on what blots are on his conscience,  he may not automatically infer the reel and rod should you waltz up to him and ask bluntly: “Vous êtes pêcheur?”  

But just think of the whole new raft of possible images:

a sin-monger

a sin market

a shoal of sin

a haul of sin

a sinning net

deepwater sin

wriggling sin

slippery sin

fresh sin

a sin laid out to dry

Fish.  Sin.  Now irrevocably entwined.

The Month-Namer

As this eighth month of the year slides rapidly to a close, I’ve a bone to pick with the Namer of Months.

Of course, it isn’t the eighth month.  You’ll have observed that, in fact, we’re at the end of the tenth month, although October, from Latin octo, meaning eight, is enough to throw you off the scent.  And let’s not get started on October’s band of hapless siblings – September (seven) November (nine) and December (ten).

So why the confusion?   To its credit, the early Roman calendar of 304 days did attempt to keep things simple by decimalising the year, although this was wholly at the expense of the period we now know of as January and February, which was written off as a monthless limbo where, let's face it, not much happened.  The year actually began in March. 

And here, some effort was expended.  March, an assertive little entity, burst in named for Mars, the Roman god of war.  This was followed by the poetic idea of opening, aperire, giving us April.  May was named after the Greek fertility goddess, Maia, and June after the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter (though Ovid suggests these two months could have been derived from maiores, the month of elders, and iuniores, the month of youth). 

But then, the Month-Namer ran plum out of ideas, stalled, and came up with the ho-hum Quintilis, (fifth month) and Sextilis, (sixth month) then seventh month, eighth month, and so on, yawn, before skipping out forever into the long afternoon, his work done.

Even when January and February - more imaginatively named for Janus, the god of the doorway, and after the purification ritual of Februa - were later parachuted in about 700 BC to allow the calendar to conform to a lunar year of 354 days, the other months simply budged up to create space and did not alter their names.   Nor did the emperors Julius and Augustus Caesar do much more than get their noses into the trough and snaffle the two premium summer months for themselves.  True, July and August are an improvement on Quintilis and Sextilis, but the aberration of the mis-named four last months remains.

When a friend studying Finnish told me the names of the months in that language, I felt both enchanted and short-changed.  Here was a language that did not resort to month-by-number, but used a different kind of logic, for example:

helmikuu – “pearl month”, possibly because melting snow on

branches can create droplets which when they refreeze are like ice pearls (our February)

heinäkuu  - “hay month” (our July)

lokakuu – “mud month” (our October)

We need only to turn to languages that do not derive entirely from Latin roots to find similar delights.  In Polish, for example, we have a calendar translated as meaning;

styczeń - touching or joining month

luty - cruel or frosty month

marzec – from the Latin Martius

kwiecień – blossom month

mai – from the Latin Maius

czerwiec – carmine scale month (gathering of larvae from the insect czerw to

make red dye)

lipiec – linden or lime tree month

sierpień – sickle month

wrzesień – heather month

paźdzjernik – broken flax stalk month

listopad – leaf fall month

grudzień – frozen clod month

But, in fact, we don’t don’t have to scratch very far to find this sort of thinking in our own inheritance.  To Anglo-Saxons, February was Mud Month (solmonað).  June was drimilcemonað, Month of Three Milkings, supposedly from the longer days, succulent grasses and greater yield in the cows. 

So this week, I’d like to offer you the fun of not just thinking up more appropriate names for September, October, November and December, but creating an entirely new calendar particular to yourself.  For example, for you, August may not be connected with sickles, or February with pearls.  Think of your own associations – perhaps connected with childhood, perhaps sporting activities that you do, perhaps aspirations.  All I ask is that you try to avoid redubbing April Tax Month………

In my own very personal calendar, I’ve taken it one step further from the association with activity to thinking of one word that encapsulates and deepens this idea.  December, for me would be month of darkness but I’d like to call it Lanterns, to symbolise the notion of illumination and hope in the longer nights.  November is a month I now associate entirely with my father – the month of his birth, the month of his death, the month of remembrance.  For me it is therefore Paternus (derived from pater, meaning father).  July I’d like to call Molten, in honour of the hot, melting days I associate with that month in my Canadian childhood.  My calendar would look like this:

Moonscar – month where moon and wan skies predominate

Sanctuary – month to retreat, rethink

Reveille – month of fanfare to jolt the season awake

Groundswell – month of growth and upsurge

Roundelay – month to dance

Touchstone – month of examinations

Molten – month of humid heat, hazy hot suns

Escapade – month of holiday, letting one’s hair down

Flitsong – month with consciousness of birds, their flight, their migration

Firebrand – month of vivid red and orange leaf-fall, bonfires

Paternus – month of my father

Lanterns – month of paths through darkness

Your turn!

Irregularity - Where Do You Stand?

I invite you to conduct your own mini survey into the delicate subject of irregularity.

No, not the affliction arising from our western diet, interesting and prevalent though that may be.  But irregularity as it concerns verbs – and one in particular: text.

You sent a text message on your mobile phone last night.  You want to tell someone.  Would you say: “I texted Maximilian last night”?  Or “I text Maximilian last night”?

Easy.  Texted, say English language purists.  After all, the way to form a simple past tense is just to add an ed.  Text, long in use as a noun, is a relatively new coinage as a verb and as such it is likely to follow the rules.  But my contention is this: those purists might write “texted”, but they are likely to say “text”.  When caught red-handed and challenged, they’ll explain it’s simply a matter of having swallowed the ending because they were speaking quickly, and that the ed was there.  Honest. 

And yet, no such swallowing tends to occur when we say tested or suggested.  It’s likely the extra effort in pronouncing the x just before the t in text creates the difficulty, a sound that does not slide out of the mouth as easily as the st in test.  (Take care when trying this unaided at home.)  We hesitate over that xt sound, and possibly then can’t be bothered to expend the extra energy required to articulate an ed as well.  

Over time, the tendency of the language is to regularise verbs, e.g. strive strove striven to increasing uses of strive strived strived, or dream dreamt dreamt to dream dreamed dreamed.  But text appears to be bucking that trend, and is an aspiring bedfellow in the sub-group of verbs that do not change their past tense or past participle and whose endings already have a past tense feel, verbs such as cast, cost and burst (the st endings) or put, set, hit (the t endings) or bid, rid, spread (the d endings).  Text may therefore one day find itself in grammar books nestled alphabetically amongst all the irregular elite:

         …teach              taught             taught

tear                 tore                 torn

tell                   told                 told

text                text                text

think               thought          thought…

For my money, irregular verbs are part of the music of our language, the pleasing sound change that gives us sleep slept slept rather than sleep sleeped sleeped.  That leads North Americans to say dive dove dove, rather than the ho-hum British dive dived dived.   That entices any creative person to choose sneak snuck snuck over the less juicy sneak sneaked sneaked.  Such words behave according to their Germanic bloodlines (send a postcard if you want the complete lecture on the Ablaut, the Rückumlaut and the Great Vowel Shift) demonstrated in the delightful sound alterations occurring in modern-day German cousins, such as blasen bläst blies geblasen (to blow) or fliegen fliegt flog geflogen (to fly).       

So listen hard next time your friends are speaking and need to use the verb text in the past tense.  My bet is that they’ll thumb their nose at conformity.  My bet is that they’ll sign up for irregularity.  My bet is that they won’t stick on an ed.

 No irregular verbs were harmed in the writing of this blog.

Sweating Ink

So, you’re trying to complete a difficult task.  You’re working your socks off, slogging your guts out.  In fact, you’re probably sweating blood as well. 

It all sounds a little messy. 

But if you’re Spanish, you wouldn’t be sweating blood at all, but ink. The Spanish language seems to have come to the conclusion that any job worth doing must involve a guttering candle, a quill, a full inkwell, and piles of vellum parchment on which to scribble, blot and smudge your tome. And so sudar tinta (to sweat ink) is the phrase you would use for such strenuous efforts.

I think I can vouch for this.  Recently I’ve been mopping my brow and armpits as I endeavour to translate into Spanish the poems from the collection I’ve been working on. I’ve pored over dictionaries, scratched lists of vocabulary, written and rewritten drafts.  (Why on earth are you doing this?  you may well ask.  Because it means I don’t have to think up any new poems.)  

The perspiration comes from the need to nit-pick for accuracy.  And there lies the fascination of learning another language – its quirky expressions that don’t have direct equivalents in English.  I came across one yesterday at my Spanish lesson with the wonderful Ana María, when we were looking at an article about the Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who wrote The Shadow of the Wind.  Zafón, it would seem, divides his time between Spain and the United States. 

Except, as Spanish would have it, he lives on horseback between Barcelona and Los Angeles.  (Zafón vive a caballo entre Los Angeles y Barcelona).

And you can just picture him: gripping the reins of his white stallion in one hand, a couple of copies of his new book The Prisoner of Heaven  in the other, galloping at full tilt for Zaragoza, for the Picos Europa, steering a course for the port of A Coruña where, incognito in a cape, he’ll stow away on a transatlantic clipper.  Down in steerage with his horse, he'll enjoy a reflective - if a little stormy - five-day crossing before disembarking  at New York.  Then he’ll speed ever westward, stopping only for sunrise over the Grand Canyon, and on towards California.  As soon as he arrives in LA, there’ll be just enough time for a booksigning, a hurried interview, and a rub-down of the steed before saddling up and cantering off to Spain once more.

I admire and applaud Zafón's horsemanship.  Not to mention all the ink he sweats into his books.

Nooit Meer Oorlog (Never Again War)

Diksmuide from the top of IJzer Tower

Diksmuide in Belgium (pictured above) is a town that has been overwritten by the stories of many different people.  But for me it bears the imprint of my father.  

I was lucky to have visited Diksmuide with him in the 1990s when he showed where he and other Royal Engineers had been stationed for a brief moment in the Second World War.  By blowing up roads and bridges, the sappers were part of a concerted attempt to slow the German advance north in May 1940.  Germany had launched an offensive on the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.  When it became clear that thousands of allied troops risked being trapped, a daring evacuation plan was implemented.  Operation Dynamo became famous as the episode when soldiers were rescued by all manner of boat from the beaches of Dunkirk.


Diksmuide, some 35 kilometres from Dunkirk, was for my father a memorable staging post on his route towards the coast and safety.  As I stood with him not far from the arch you can see in the photograph at the top of this page, he pointed out where he had faced the enemy just across the IJzer River, and where the bridge had been blown up.  Just up the road, he found again the farm where he had taken shelter and from where he was the last man of his platoon to flee, losing precious minutes on a dodgy motorbike that would not start.

The IJzer Tower and museum

But the patch of ground familiar to my father also happens to be the site of a monument of significance to Flemish people.  A large tower with the initials AVV-VVK or Alles Voor Vlaanderen-Vlaanderen voor Kristus  (All for Flanders - Flanders for Christ) and visible for miles across the flat Belgian countryside was erected on the spot of an earlier war memorial that was largely destroyed in 1946.  It now contains a fascinating museum.


When I visited Diksmuide again recently while on a daytrip to Dunkirk, I was made aware how keenly the Flemish community has struggled for Dutch language and culture rights.  The issues have simmered for years, the young man at the reception desk in the museum said.  They started at the official birth of the kingdom of Belgium in 1831, when the decision was taken that French would be the main language.  They were perpetuated through divisions that saw the majority of the bourgeoisie speaking French, and officers in the Belgian army speaking only French so that Flemish soldiers did not always understand their orders.  They carried on through continued resistance to Dutch being taught in schools.  "If I go to the French speaking part of my country, I am able to address people in French," he said.  "But if they come here, they cannot speak to me in Dutch.”  And certainly, in the museum the impetus towards Flemish recognition and emancipation was apparent through the narratives and exhibits displaying glories and injustices - how, for example, the Flemish had to fight for the right to have the names on graves of fallen soldiers inscribed in Dutch rather than French.

Painting of WWI trenches around Diksmuide: as from top of IJzer Tower

But another surprise waited on the top floor of the tower.  Here,  a painted 360◦ panorama (left) shows Diksmuide as it was at the time of the First World War.  For this area is part of Flanders which saw some of the Great War's heaviest fighting.  What may look like railway lines in the painting on the left are actually lines of trenches, some running along the side of the river, which formed the front line in the Battle of the Yser (IJzer in Dutch).  In October 1914 the Belgians opened canal gates in order to flood the area all round the river.  It was a desperate measure to defend territory, but the town of Diksmuide fell to the Germans in the November.   

I looked out across from the topmost point of the tower over the Diksmuide of 2012 and towards the flat land beyond.  It was a glorious sunny Sunday.  And I thought about soldiers nearly one hundred years ago in appalling conditions for long months in trenches.  I thought about nearby Dunkirk and the smoke, rubble and chaos a generation later in a different war when men waited for help on the sandy beach.  I thought about the relief of the 340,000 allied troops who were rescued, the sacrifice of the more than 4,000 who were not, and the luck of my father who had eventually got the motorbike started and, though wounded in the leg, managed to limp aboard a Royal Navy vessel rather than being left behind to become one of 40,000 prisoners.

Across this patch of land, as in so many parts of Europe, it was clear that history lay in deep layers.  Even now Belgium creaks and strains under the aspirations of its Flemish and Walloon communities.  And the words spoken only an hour before by the museum's receptionist reverberated in my mind: "We are not ETA or the IRA,” he had said.  “We are doing things step by step, politically and correctly."  


This swathe of territory - disputed, seized, liberated -  still asks for constant vigilance in order to maintain its peace.


  

Nooit meer Oorlog - Never again war .  These words are written on the IJzer Tower in Dutch, French, English and German.  These were the languages of the forces involved in the area during WW1.

Nightlife in High Heels und Flip Flops

Last week’s blog was about magic boots.  This week, footwear makes another appearance, but only because Nightlife in High Heels und Flip Flops was a newspaper headline that caught my eye.

It’s the word und that gives the game away, for this is actually German, and a phrase from a Viennese paper.  And it is the evidence that an awful lot has been happening in the German language since I last looked.

Basically, the world of fashion has embraced English in a caring sharing way.  So there are articles with lots of Tipps telling us how to appear younger through correct hairstyle und anderen Anti-Aging Tricks, or using den richtigen Make-Up.  We can chart die coolsten Outfits of the week.  Of course, dein Look is extremely important when you want to be seen at die besten Hot-Spots or even out Shopping.   

You might think that our generous donation of words to continental Europe has brought us slim pickings by way of return.  You, too, may have been disappointed by the arrival on our doorstep of that rather plain German prefix über (as in übertrendy).  Yet, to its credit, it has been valiantly punching above its weight and is now so überused in most of our British Sunday newspaper supplements that you may have become übersick.

But in fact, we have little to whinge about.  We Anglophones have for centuries been snaffling up words from different corners of the globe, stuffing them up our jumpers and into our bulging pockets, and then strewing them around as if we’d dreamt them up ourselves.

It’s time to redress the balance, and I’m hopeful that German will not ditch its original words to make way for the modish English imports, but keep both.  In this way synonyms arise, giving the option to match words to different contexts.

English speakers have long been basking in the luxury of this kind of choice, especially after King Harold took an arrow in the eye and the Normans waded ashore in 1066, unpacking their version of French in their requisitioned castles.  Rather than supplanting the Anglo-Saxon tongue of the local inhabitants, Norman French grew alongside as the language of the landed gentry.  Thanks to this legacy of duality, we can use words originating either from Anglo-Saxon, which often sound more basic, or words from Norman French, which give a more educated feel.  Depending on exactly what effect we are trying to create, we could say dig.  Or we could say excavate.  We could say lift or elevate.  Find or encounter.  Wash or launder.  Speak or converse.  Stop or terminate.  The list goes on and on (or continues, to use the Norman word).

Languages can be invigorated by their borrowings.  German speakers no doubt enjoy the flexibility provided by English additions running parallel to their traditional words, allowing them to decide between, for example, ladylike instead of damenhaft, or clever instead of raffiniert.

Or Nightlife in High Heels und Flip Flops instead of Nachtleben in hohen Absätzen und Gummilatschen. 

Nightlife in High Heels und schmützigen Trainers

Post Script
And in the way of these things, I've come across a fun blog called High Heels and Flip Flops.  You can check it out here http://www.highheelsflipflops.com/p/why-high-heels-flip-flops.html