Whatchoo Say
14th September 2026
It is a gift of Anglosphere culture that we can have obfuscatory rhetoric in any size or shape we want. Perhaps because of the wealth of options, it is not so strange that the first example that comes to my mind is from a 1978 novel titled The Empty Copper Sea. A Florida businessman disappears, presumed drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, but there is some evidence he made it across the water and is now living under a new identity. There is also some evidence that he had been selling assets and emptying bank accounts. I won’t spoil the story by revealing how he is found, or where, or in what physical or financial condition, but I do want to mention his attorney. This man is as genuinely ignorant as everyone else in their seaside town, but he feels that his client, dead or alive, still has interests to be defended. The advocate cannot agree with the idea that money was stolen, or even hidden. On the contrary, he suggests the man was fixing to turn his failing businesses around, as he had often done before, and to that end had simply “enhanced his cash position.”
One of finest of the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald. Read The Whole Series.
Come to think of it, I’ve read quite a few stories like this – I think they had titles like The Story, or maybe The Novel, or was it The Book – but while John Grisham is a talented author, I think John D. MacDonald was better at this. What I really want to discuss, however, are the two ways we can say something in English: Germanic and Latinate. Harsher words like “stolen” and “hidden” are Germanic; gentler words like “enhanced” and “position” are Latinate. What I really want to pursue is how other cultures manage this – if indeed they do at all. What about cultures that are largely or completely Latinate? Or ones that aren’t at all? In those, what do you do when you want to sound like a pompous jerk?
The reason English is everybody’s second language is exactly this overwhelming flexibility. (Plus Britain and America.)
It may be that riders of mass transit in Guatemala City and Mexico City say with a straight face – there being no other way to do it – that they’re using movilidad integrada. And it may be that the school system in Slovenia still says it’s dealing with Gypsy students using fleksibilna diferenciacija. I can believe education bureaucrats everywhere embrace such lingo. But what do people in, oh, Asia do?
I’m sure you’re going to tell us….