>>>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
>

That's the same example from which you started. Another one?

Actually, I could come up with a few that I heard from our daughter (at her fourth year of French now), if only I could remember them.

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

Parlez vous Franglais? :) I'm actually shocked that they spell biftek phonetically (exactly the way we do - yes, we borrowed that word from the French :), not as "bifteque".

>>BTW, some of these borrowed words do get returned! The word "stol"
>
>I suppose that's "stool" in Englsih so it's got corrupted.

I guess the invention is as old as the whole Indo-European family of languages, so the word is widespread in various forms. Funny though, that sometimes it means a table, sometimes a chair, or that the words are similar. In Russian table:chair = stol:stul; in Serbian, sto:stolica (yes, a female table). And in medical use, "stolica" also means stool, i.e. excrement.

Accidentally, our word for hundred is "stotina", but that means "a hundred"; when used as a number, it's almost always just "sto", and is a suffix for 200 (dvesto), 300 (tristo), 400 (četirsto) etc. Now you can imagine all the puns that can be made by confusing a table with a hundred.

>>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"

One of the funniest expressions I met was "rolling pin" :). Now take a pin, and try to roll it over dough... We call that "oklagija" - and the "klag" sound in it almost gives you the feeling you'd get if it met your head when you come home late.

And a badger is a badge maker - just lake a crater makes crates.

>>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!

I guess the state TV got them on the cheap then. Anyway, they were far better than what we bad imitations of Jerry Lewis that we had as mainstream comedy on TV. But they surely graduated fast - within a couple of years we were watching Monty Python.