English Is Made of Saxon Words and Latin Words. Here’s How to Use Them.

Winston Churchill knew this deeply. “The shorter words,” he says, “are usually the more ancient”. And “they appeal with greater force to simple understandings than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek”.

When French arrived in England it was the language of the conqueror and the new nobility. A thousand years later, words from French still connote a certain fanciness and distance from the gritty, and Saxon words still seem plainer, less formal, and closer to the earth.