An example is the Spanish “footing”.  It was borrowed from French, which took it from the English word meaning “position”.
In Spanish, however, it has come to mean jogging.

footing.

(Voz francesa, y esta con cambio de sentido del ingl. footing ‘posición’ ).

1. m. Paseo higiénico que se hace corriendo con velocidad moderada al aire libre.

Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados

Roughly translated:  French word with a change in meaning from the English ‘footing’, meaning position.
1. masculine noun. Healthful movement [exercise] done by running outdoors at a moderate pace.

Are there other English words that have come to mean something different from the original when adopted by
another language?  Smoking, in Brazilian Portuguese, means tuxedo, but that’s not too far from its source, smoking jacket.

Duke

PS The spell check nixes online as one word.

Grey areas would be zeitgeist (spirit of the age works just as well? (and the spellchecker lets that through!)); et al (and others); sui generis (unique); &c.

Some have specific applications such as legal pro bono, philosophical a priori, a posteriori, and these have stuck after prolonged usage.

Cul de sac (dead end) and entre nous (between you and me) are unnecessary and pretentious I would say and there must be many more of these. Part of it must be that writers (or speakers) feel they are erudite and eloquent if they go for the foreign over the homegrown.

Finally, are there any English loanwords in other languages that have no equivalent as in my first para? ‘Le dirty weekend’ in French is the only, er, conceptual one I can think of.

Hope this hasn’t been covered before, possibly by me - I found it in my old notes after being reminded by the slip in in last post

1448, “relating to things” (esp. property), from O.Fr. reel, from L.L. realis “actual,” from L. res “matter, thing,” of unknown origin. Real estate is first recorded 1666 and retains the oldest Eng. sense of the word;

Escapee seems unnecessary, however, as there is nothing to contrast it to. Escaper would surely be more sensible? Is it just conformity to the tradition described in the usage note which also cites absentee (and we never hear absenter). Are there any exceptions at all?

King Charles II ‘The Black Boy,’ apparently was not alone. His whole noble family was more or less black skinned. But there were also commoners who were black and coloured, and so far Mike Nassau is the only one on the web who has tackled this problem. Explaining the black presence in Europe and among the early immigrants to the USA. They were not descendents of African slaves but autochthons Europeans. Does anyone know of other book sources which explain these matters?

Egmond Codfried

*(ad a g for viewing the image)

Fragment of Mike Nassau’s article:

“3. Schwarze Deutsche or Black Germans, found along the Danube River in Austria and Germany, in the Black Forest and, to a lesser extent, along the Rhine River, have dark hair and eyes, unlike the fairer people both north and south of them. Their descendants in America may be called either Black Dutch or Black German. The origin of their dark coloration is ancient, from the Roman army in the third and fourth centuries, C.E. The Roman army of this time period was mostly made up of German mercenary soldiers, but along the German border, the Romans preferred to station non-Germans. The army on the Danube was largely drawn from Numidian and Nubian soldiers, especially Garamante Numidians. The Garamante (called Tubu now) were Black Africans from the central Sahara. Now the Tubu live in northern Chad, eastern Niger and southern Libya. They are not usually found north of Marzuk in Fezzan or Kufra in Cyrenaica now, but in Roman times they ranged north to the central coast of Libya and to Ghadames in southern Tunisia. As well as Garamante, there were some Iranic people stationed on this frontier, especially Sarmatians (called Ossets now) and Scythians (Ashkenazi in the Hebrew Bible) from southern Russia and the Ukraine (Ashkenaz, the old Hebrew for Scythia, has been used for Germany in modern Hebrew by Ashkenazic Jews trying to ingratiate themselves with Germans and Austrians or trying to hide their Khazar ancestry). These African and Iranic soldiers left many descendants who tend to have black, heavy hair and dark eyes even yet.
Beethoven and Hitler are two famous examples of this group (Peanuts). It is interesting to imagine Hitler’s reaction to someone telling him he probably got his heavy, black hair from Black African ancestry. Since this was so long ago, with population movement and inter-marriage, all Europeans must have some ancestry from these Black African soldiers. In sixty generations, a person could leave 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 descendants with just two children per person each generation so long as no descendants married each other. Obviously, after a time, many descendants will marry each other, but still it works out statistically that most people from that long ago who left descendants at all are ancestors of everyone in Europe today. The tendency for people to stay in their own community explains why we can see the effects along the Danube and in the Black Forest in the people with black hair and dark eyes but do not see it far away like Iceland. The concentration is far greater at the point of origin, but the dispersion radiates out to everywhere given enough time.”

SOURCE: http://www.blackdutch1.webs.com/

Duke

The particular term I’m posting about is from this passage:

For my own part, d’ye see, I was none of your Guinea-pigs; I did not rise in the service by parliamenteering interest, or a handsome bitch of a wife. I was not hoisted over the bellies of better men, nor strutted athwart the quarter-deck in a laced doublet and thingumbobs at the wrists. Damn my limbs!

I was taken aback by the usage at first, taking it in the modern sense and not quite seeing how it was apt. OED soon cleared up my confusion. First cite for the modern sense of “.... person or thing used like a guinea-pig as the subject of an experiment.” is 1920, with an earlier 1913 cite from Shaw referenced as developmental.

[1913 G. B. SHAW Quintessence of Ibsenism Now Completed 135 The..folly which sees in the child nothing more than the vivisector sees in a guinea pig: something to experiment on with a view to rearranging the world.] 1920 U. SINCLAIR Brass Check xviii. 102 Say to yourself that Upton Sinclair is a guinea-pig.

Smollett was using the term in an earlier nautical sense:

2. Naut.  a. A midshipman in the East Indian service.  b. An inefficient seaman.

1747 Adv. Kidnapped Orphan 69 He sent his nephew, at the age of fourteen, on a voyage as a Guinea-pig. 1748 SMOLLETT Rod. Rand. xxiv, A brave fellow as ever crackt bisket; none of your guinea pigs. 1840 MARRYAT Poor Jack xxvi, The midshipmen, or guinea pigs, as they are called. 1867 SMYTH Sailor’s Word-Bk., Guinea-pigs, the younger midshipmen of an Indiaman.

Back now to the story and Gamaliel Pickle’s nuptials. (I do love Smollett!)

BTW I’ve just removed an {em} from a cite. Does anyone know of a font which can cope with the various characters OED uses?

Also, is anyone familiar with the designation, “Preissich”?  Since my family came to the US
in 1847, might it refer to a political entity of the time? It seems unlikely that it has anything to do with
“Prussian”.

Duke