>>>>BTW, a plug in French is "un tampon". I wonder what they call tampons. Go pick on them and their inadequate language.
>>>
>>>I think both our languages have this habit of borrowing French words and using them for something else but their original meaning.
>>
>>The point is that we use their words to impart a different meaning on something similar, whereas they're left with just the one expression.
>
>Ah, but do we know that for sure?

Well, par example:

Your wish is my command:     Votre souhait est ma commande
Waiter, I ordered some soup: Serveur, J'ai commandé du potage
I command you to follow me:  Je vous commande de me suivre

>In some cases I know they have a different word for that other meaning, it just didn't get borrowed. That's what you get when fashion dictates the migration of words. In other cases, yes I figure they are too much of purists to borrow back :)

How about "Biftek" for beef steak (as opposed to "steack" for (horse) steak)?

>
>BTW, some of these borrowed words do get returned! The word "stol"

I suppose that's "stool" in Englsih so it's got corrupted.

>(table, though not a dbf or a timetable, but the thing with legs and a board (not of directors, of wood rather)

An antiquated English word for "table", which we got from the Normans, is "board", as in the scandinavian Smorgisbord.


See, our language is rife with them!

>on top that you put your dinner on) was borrowed from Slavic languages. It became asztal (ostol). It came back as "astal" (ah-stahl) and mostly had the status of a dialectal variant, not proper language. Nowadays I see it in so-called Bosnian language as "hastal" (with audible haitch) as is their fashion to go back to roots when the aitch was supposedly audible everyHwere, IOW trying to make it sound like an ancient Bosnian word :).
>
>>>Our borrowed word "broš" (brosh) means a lapel pin, from French "broche" - needle.
>>
>>The English word for that is "Brooch" (pronounced broach - as in roach) now that you've broached the subject.
>
>You got that pinned down.

Incidentally, what the Americans call a "pin" as in election campaign thing you put on your lapel, we call a "badge"

>
>>>and I can only guess how does it relate with the Latin

"... how it relates to ..."

>>>word for song. When kids throw a party, it's a "žurka" (zhoorkah), formerly "žur" (jour) - which is funny, they usually happen at night. "Žurnal" is either a fashion magazine or the newsreel shown before the movie
>>
>>Don't tell me you have a word that has more than one meaning! Gadzooks!
>
>We do have a few, of course, and a good chunk of those are borrowed, or old words which corresponded to same old words in other languages, then when the latter acquired new meanings, ours did too, in translation. So our tape recorders also have heads, and magnets have fields (where nobody expect any other animals grazing but electric sheep).
>
>We actually don't have a word for pun, had to translate that with "word game". When British sitcoms started running on our TV (I remember "On the buses" and "Doctor in the house" were among the first)

Geez times were rough then - 2 of the worst ever Britcoms!

>, the viewers started complaining about the subtitles missing a lot, because the characters were laughing and they didn't find anything funny in the translated text. Then the editor of the language column in a weekly explained about the ambiguity, puns etc, and asked his readers to try to come up with their own.

Interestingly a Dutchman once told me that in Dutch cinemas, when watching an English comedy film with subtitles, you get 2 laughs: The immediate educated people's laugh and then the less educated sub-titles-reading people's laugh :-)

>
>Three weeks later he wrote "many people asked why didn't I follow up on the request to readers to provide our own puns - and I would have, there were a few hundred responses, but there was only one for print". The phrase "is not for print" (nije za štampu) is Serbian equivalent of "pardon my French".
>
>But soon the practice took off. We have nice puns today, though we still don't have a word for them.