ABSTRACT
It is never good pedagogic policy to assign foreign designations to concepts being taught in English to primarily monolingual English-speaking students. Doing so runs the risk of making even the most relevant and lively topic seem distant and difficult. However, as already noted in connection with the “purity versus vernacularity” bipolar dimension, English has no strong corpus-planning bias against foreignisms and it doesn’t take long for them to lose their foreign-markedness in English contexts, to feel perfectly “at home” there and to be regarded as perfectly good American (English) words, just as have “glitch”, “sarong”, “kamikaze”, “kosher”, “tomato”, and so forth. And so it will also be, most Americans believe, with other “foreignisms”: familiarity breeds respect, or, at least, the recognition that “no offense” has been either intended or taken.
