Rant: Personal items

Although Britain’s departure from the European Union may one day be summed up as a tale of shortcomings and long goings, historians may still be struck by how little 55 years of membership seem to have affected the language. Whether jackboot, juggernaut, leviathan or monster is the term of choice for critics, the fiend has left few marks upon our vocabulary.

Shorter regimes – if that’s the right word – have introduced, or given new meaning to, enduring words and expressions. The Third Reich lasted only 12 years but gave us Anschluss, Blitzkrieg, final solution, gas chamber and Nazi, among other terms. Colonial rule brought the imposition of entire languages – English, French, German and Portuguese – to most of sub-saharan Africa, though in many places this outburst of imperialism formally lasted little more than 75 years.

What will Britain’s European interlude bequeath to the English language? A bunch of Euro-terms, for starters. Eurocrat, ‘meddlesome bureaucrat who wants to straighten bananas’, has been popular for years. So has Europhile (‘traitor’; ‘wimp’; ‘person who prefers his sauce verte to brown’). Eurosceptic, though, is different: it defines a ‘clearsighted, true Brit, who stood alone in 1940 and went on to win a war in which France came second and Germany a distant third’.

Not all Euro-words derive from Britain’s membership of the EU. ‘Eurocommunism’, an attempt in the 1970s to establish a democratic form of communism, was unrelated. Eurodollars were US dollar deposits held by nonAmericans in banks in Europe. The Eurofighter is an expensive aircraft made by Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Eurovision is a painful song contest for members of the European Broadcasting Union, plus some notobviously-european countries such as Australia, Israel and Morocco.

Perhaps the least loved Euro-word is euro. This, the most tangible evidence of ever-closer union, is a ‘currency doomed to fall apart, ruin Europe and end in widespread tears’, yet strangely seems to rise as the pound falls.

The coming of the euro has relegated to history some old friends, such as the franc, the guilder, the Deutschmark and the Italian lira. It has also overtaken the ecu (the European currency unit, as well as the ancient French coin, the écu). Other novelties may help to revive old-timers: the northern European countries trying to strengthen the European Stability Mechanism are called the New Hanseatic League.

Still going strong or only recently abolished are the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy, which once filled lakes with wine and built mountains out of butter), ‘set-aside’ (land farmers are paid not to cultivate) and ‘discards’ (fish of the wrong size or species that must be thrown back into the sea).

Even more robust are a few places little known before the EU. Schengen is a small town in Luxembourg that has given its name to an area of 1.7 million square miles in which its 420 million inhabitants can move around without passports. Maastricht is a Dutch town where a treaty was signed that led to the creation of the modern EU. Strasbourg is a gastronomic centre in Alsace, which is also the terminus for a gravy train stuffed with members of the European Parliament.

A Euro-word that, though ugly, deserves to survive is ‘subsidiarity’. It denotes the principle that government should be carried out at the lowest level possible. ‘Backstop’ – common in baseball and thence finance, but not widely used in Britain before last year – may last longer. So may ‘Project Fear’.

So may Brexiteer, an English word whose suffix is an anglicised form of the French -ier. Other members of the family include buccaneer, electioneer, musketeer, profiteer and racketeer. No wonder Remoaners sniff bad blood.