Languages affect each other; they inject new meaning into each other, and like water rushing out of a dam, the more porous the barriers are, the weaker the force. Most of the silver bars that power London are translations from Latin, French, and German. But those bars are losing their efficacy. As linguistic flow spreads across continents – as words like saute and gratin become a standard part of the English lexicon – the semantic warp loses its potency.’
