I spent some forty years teaching English, including expository writing, loyally following Strunk and White and George Orwell in encouraging plain style, simple writing — and as much as possible sticking to English.

            Indeed, in later years I come to discourage even using the Latin abbreviations "etc.," "e.g.," and "i.e."

            If you're writing *"ect," you're not thinking et cetera, and you might as well just spell out "and the rest," "and more," or, and usually, "and so forth."

            "I.e." (id est) is different from "e.g." (exempli gratia). "I.e.," means "that is"; "e.g.," means "for (the sake of) example"; and confusing them can get you into minor trouble, e.g., when writing a rule.

"No one on school property shall direct an obscene gesture at a school official, teacher, visitor, or student, e.g., 'the one-finger salute.'"

"No one on school property shall direct an obscene gesture at a school official, treacher, visitor, or student, i.e., 'the one-finger salute.'"

Having received a decent street education in an ethnically diverse neighborhood, I know a number of obscene gestures. Let's say I directed a British-style, two-finger salute toward a student or a dean — or the Mediterranean "fig"; I'd violate the first formulation of the rule but not the second. ("Mooning" the dean would be gross and excessive, and might be forbidden under other rules.)

            English is a huge, broad, and expanding language, so one should be able to find the right word in English — or make one up — and not have to borrow very often from a foreign language and risk losing some readers or having others think you, or me, a pretentious, pedantic, prick.

            On the other hand, English has many words and can come across as quite exact and thereby mislead.

            For example, in a recent Reform Jewish prayerbook, one of the standard blessings is translated (in a gender-neutral fashion), "Blessed is the Eternal God, Ruler of the universe, who hallows us with Mitzvot and who commands us to engage in the study of Torah." Now "Torah" is coming into English usage, but Mitzvot and its singular form mitzvah are still pretty much Hebrew. Why not just translate them to "Law" for Torah and "commandments" for Mitzvot?

            In a Christian reading of Scripture, the "Old Testament" in general and the first five books of Moses in particular are emphatically "the Law," and they lay down commandments.

            OK, but in one Jewish numbering of the Decalog — "Decalog" is Americanized Greek for "The Ten Words" — the first, well, mitzvah, is "I, the Eternal, am your God who led you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage"; the second is the unequivocal commandment, "You shall have no other gods beside Me."

            Mitzvah has more than one possible translation(s) into English, as does Torah: The first precept in the Decalog may by that Yahweh is the God of the Israelites, a central part of the Mosaic Teaching.

            There's no reason that a Reform prayerbook should concede in its word choices a Christian or hard-nose Orthodox rabbinic reading that Moses set down the Law and 613 (by God!) commandments.

            Better to leave key terms like mitzvah and Torah untranslated and open for argument.

            Similarly, I chose to leave an awkward German term untranslated even in a book complimented for being "written in English, not academese."

            The German word Kampf can mean "military conflict, battle, combat, contention, fight; argument, strife; athletic match, struggle." I chose to avoid the English phrase "culture wars" and go back to a term very much in its background.

The German term Kulturkampf (literally, "culture struggle") refers to German policies inrelation to secularity and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, enacted from 1871 to 1878 by the Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. * * * The word […] has also been used to refer to similar cultural conflicts in other times and places. In the United States, the term culture war has been used by Patrick Buchanan, among others, to describe an analogous conflict starting in the 1960s and continuing to the present between religious social conservatives and secular social liberals (Buchanan used the English "culture war," though in the context Buchanan used it, as a war between traditional morality and avant-garde liberalism, it clearly evoked memories of the earlier German experience). […] This theme of "culture war" was the basis of Buchanan's keynote speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention.

            The "tall tale" and "stretcher" are part of American folk and literary tradition, and we tend to like the rhetorical move of hyperbole, overstatement. Fine. But we really, really overuse the word "war" — with "wars" on crime, poverty, drugs — and this figure of speech warps our perceptions.

            There is in the United States, as elsewhere, tension and conflict of interests between and among classes, ethnicities, and, indeed, groups with different cultural assumptions.

            And those tensions and conflicts of interests result in struggles (Kampfen); those struggles will and should be robust, but they do not have to be violent; they do not have to become even figurative, take-no-prisoners wars.

            The people who prepared the Reform prayerbook did well to leave untranslated some key terms and thereby leave open long-standing conflict over the meaning of those terms.

            We may do even better to go to a jaw-straining, harangue-slowing term like Kulturkampfen to replace the dangerous cliché of "Culture Wars."

            We do have cultural struggle in the US, even as we have class struggle. Struggle and conflict are inevitable; war is not.

            So stick to English, and, in America, goll-durn American English. But not dogmatically. Sometimes we can learn from, and usefully steal from, other languages that form part of the American heritage.