Programme 23: euro

Euro. No named part of the world has introduced more new words into English than Europe. It’s all happened of course in the last 10 or 20 years, and it’s this 'euro' prefix that’s caused all the attention to be focussed on the area of Europe. The euro of course is the most obvious thing: the actual unit of money which became so popular in Europe a few years ago, and now everybody talks about it. But, it’s not just that. It’s the prefix 'euro' being used as a blend word along with all sorts of other things. Early on for instance, people talked about euro currency and euro money, and then the euro fighter came along with the Defence Establishment’s development. And now, everything has a 'euro' possibility – so one of the commonest ways of creating new words in English these days is take a perfectly ordinary word and just shove ‘euro’ in front of it. So, you can have euro butter for regulations to do with butter and euro eggs and euro chickens and euro fireworks and euro…..anything you like really. prefix - předpona the new unit of currency - jednotka nové měny "named part of the world" - místní název euro fighter - (euro)stíhačka euro butter - po "evropsku" vyrobené máslo fireworks - raketa, ohňostroj regulations - nařízení, směrnice to shove - strčit, vrazit