Quick thoughts: Honey and 1066

Hammering out long complex philosophical thoughts is something I do as well as beavers build freeways.

So let me try something simple.

I was "helping" my daughter with her project on bees this evening (due tomorrow, some things never change) when I came across this wonderfully familiar fact:

Origins of words:

Bee: Old English bēo, of Germanic origin

Hive: Old English hȳf, of Germanic origin.

Honey: Old English hunig, of Germanic origin

What does this have to do with 1066?
For hundreds of years, England was conquered by Celts, Franks, Romans, Vikings, and, most importantly for this story, German speaking Anglo-Saxons in 450 AD. Then they stopped being conquered for a bit and a language called Old English was created, mostly from German with some words from the languages of the previous conquerors.
In 1066 a French guy called William conquered England and gave all the important positions in the kingdom to his French buddies.
Over the centuries these foreigners introduced all of their fancy foreign words into English to create a new language called middle English. Being fancy folk with foreign ways, those words only described the kind of things they bothered with.

This eventually developed into modern English which was created by everyone being really lazy with pronunciation. Then about 100 years ago someone created a language called American which was even lazier, if you can believe it.
Eventually my children's generation created something which is allegedly language which I can't even.

So now we have an English language where most of the hard working bits come from German and all the fancy stuff comes from French. The really dumb bits come from Miley Cyrus and Stephen Hawking.

For example:
Work: from the German "Werk"
Managing Director: from Latin "manage" & [Anglo-Norman] French "directour"
Sheep: from the German "Schaf"
Civilian (Human sheep): from Old French "civilien"
Football: German
Tennis: French
Boss: from Dutch "baas" [via South Africa]
Apartheid: from Afrikaans [via South Africa]

BFF: Origin unknown

String theory: Two words that each make sense but taken together start talking about "one dimension[al] objects"... OK, boy bands and I really, really can't even.

So I am writing in a language that has three parts.

A German part which I use if I want to get work done.

A French part which one should certainly use to seduce the mademoiselles.

And a modern part which make you hip to the jive of the new lingo, y'all.

Comprende?