Tuesday 30 November 2010

British self-deception

Part of the dream world that many Brits live in, where our mediocre society is supposedly the envy of the world, is that the English language has many more words than any other. Some idiot on the BBC said as much this morning, claiming 400 000 words. In fact the vast majority of these words are scientific compounds which exist in any cultivated language. Also, the German LEO dictionary claims to have 400 000 words. The way to deal with these idiots is to ask them to produce a word unique to English. They'll then say "chocolate" or some other word common to many languages.