Words Are Like Children

Words are like children. You have to take care of them, but they also have a mind of their own. Take loanwords for example. They have a life of their own once imported from a language to another language. In Slovene we often try to find a Slovene new word to replace a loanword, but it does not always work. Sometimes we keep both the loanword and the Slovene replacement. They might even slightly differ in meaning over time. In other cases one of them prevails and the other once dies. Let us take a look at a few examples. In Slovene we use both laptop and prenosnik. They mean the exact same thing:...