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I caught myself yesterday typing that "that's been the established procedure since years." Which is not standard English, but it's a construction a lot of my G

I caught myself yesterday typing that "that's been the established procedure since years." Which is not standard English, but it's a construction a lot of my German/ESL coworkers use, and apparently it's soaking in. I'm fine with this; I've happily added "do the needful" to my lexicon because it perfectly fills a gap. Sometimes a construction that works elsewhere _works for a reason_ and it's worth borrowing back.

dhosek 5y ago
My wife's native language is Spanish and she hates when I use ungrammatical constructs because she trusts me to model correct grammar for her. I, on the other hand, have superlative grammar but enjoy applying other language's grammatical constructs to English. I just workshopped a story with my writing group which is written in a synthetic pidgin that I created for the Burkinabe characters in the piece. There was some admiration for the technical achievement, but concerns that it might be offensive having come from a white author, a concern that I had as well.