Newsflash: word borrowed from German into English!!

The G20 summit in London has highlighted a recent borrowing of a German word into English,  an occurrence sufficiently rare these days to warrant trumpeting it.  Plenty of words get borrowed from English into other languages,  but borrowings in the other direction don't seem to happen a lot anymore.

This one is not just a borrowing,  but that subtle breed of borrowing known to linguists as a calque,  or loan translation.  This is a rather nifty pair of terms for it,  since "calque" is itself a loanword from French,  whereas "loan translation" is even more apt,  being itself a loan translation from the German word Lehnübersetzung.

The marvellous term in question is "to kettle",  with its derived noun "kettle".  The Word Spy website (devoted to English neologisms) defines the verb as "to maneuver protesters into a small area using a cordon of police personnel and vehicles."  The idea is for police to contain groups of protesters - usually those thought to be most likely to "cause trouble" - by effectively sealing them off into a small space,  and holding them in that space for several hours, up to a whole day in some cases.  The noun refers to the tight circle of frustrated protesters thus created.  In German the verb is "einkesseln";  the related noun is usually "Einkesselung".  It's a term I'm personally very well acquainted with in German from street protests in Berlin about five or six years ago.

There are two things that tell us the term was borrowed from German into English and not the other way around:  in German its meaning is broader,  and is used to refer not only to police operations but also and originally to military manoeuvres,  where in English one would say "encircle" or "surround".  It's very commonly the case when a word is borrowed that its meaning in the original language will be broader than its meaning in the adoptive language.

Also, the word is very well-established in German,  going back decades if not centuries in its military sense,  whereas the first instance in English that Word Spy could find is from 2006.  The form in which it then appeared,  namely "kettling in",  is further confirmation of its German origin;  the "in" seems to have dropped off since.  When I first read the term a few weeks ago,  I thought it might have made the leap during the protests in Heiligendamm against the G8 in 2007,  but evidently international solidarity among European protesters has deeper foundations than that.