When a French magazine recently proclaimed on its front cover that "Le Smoking: c'est chic!", this had nothing to do with encouraging nicotine addiction.
On the contrary, in France "le smoking" refers to what we English-speakers know as a dinner jacket - a typical example of how language, when it crosses frontiers, can also change meanings.
This, in essence, is the lesson to be learned from Prof Karlin's book: that etymology demonstrates the laws of Darwin's theory of evolution and that trying to exert control over our culture's development is an exercise doomed to failure. If this seems a lofty conclusion to reach from a slender volume devoted to a single, and very specific, aspect of one writer's work, then so be it; Karlin's analysis of English words and terminology in À la recherche du temps perdu demonstrates yet again the abiding universality of Proust's novel.
It helps that Proust himself was similarly obsessed with tracking down origins, whether of parish or flower or family name. He was a linguistic archaeologist, prepared to delve back to an original source long-since buried beneath accretions of corruption and distortion.
But at the same time Proust was no pedantic purist. His work is filled with an abundance of English terms that reflect both the Anglomanie of late-19th century France and also the way in which certain new words establish an abiding presence in every nation's colloquial speech whenever they better represent societal change than does the existing idiom. Thus, for example, the establishment in 1834 of "le Jockey-Club" arose from a growing interest among French aristocrats in "le turf". Later, they would also take up "le polo" and "le golf" while the wealthier among them might acquire "un yacht". There exists an amplitude of words in the French language to mean boat, but none of them satisfactorily sums up the experience of "yachting", which is why it turns up more than once in the Balbec chapters of Proust's book.
Purists, of course, frowned upon this influx of foreign terms, just as in our own country the GAA so profoundly dislikes the advent of non-national games - and with as little effect. Culture and language are far less rigid than the preservers of national ideology would wish to believe; alien influences effect us whether we invite them to do so or not. Prof Karlin devotes an entertaining chapter to the spirited but hopeless efforts made by serial late-19th century linguists to preserve French from the onslaught of the English. They were the forerunners of those government officers in Paris today who argue for the encouragement of an indigenous cinema industry by means of controlling the importation of American films. But French children will persist in wanting to watch Disney's latest confection, just as their predecessors - no matter how many times chastised for doing so - ate un sandwich while wearing un sweater and attending un déjeuner ultra-select.
The last of these terms derives from a 1907 newspaper report on the Normandy seaside resort of Cabourg and demonstrates a feature of the use of English words in Proust's novel: that, much like contemporary Irish youth's borrowings from trans-Atlantic television, their purpose is to demonstrate the user's awareness of modernity. The most anglophone character in À la recherche is also the most socially insecure: the courtesan Odette de Crécy who uses English as a way of establishing her grasp of current trends. She refers to her admirer, and later husband, Charles Swann as "my love" and speaks of taking "five o'clock tea".
Odette's preoccupation with deploying what she believes to be au courant language has the counter effect of marking her as irredeemably vulgar and incapable of acceptance within the aristocratic society to which she aspires.
Her opposite, Swann's old friend, the Duchesse de Guermantes (who refuses ever to receive or be introduced to his wife), speaks exquisite, traditional French untainted by impurities.
Yet, as Proust ironically shows, her speech is a metaphor for the sterility not just of Mme de Guermantes but also of the world she inhabits. Just as the French language has come to absorb a multitude of English words and terms, so by the end of À la recherche has the seemingly exclusive faubourg Saint-Germain come to accept the presence in its midst of the former Odette de Crécy as well as the transformation of the bourgeois Mme Verdurin into a princess and the once intolerably Jewish Albert Bloch into fashionable author Jacques de Rozier.
For French society, the alternative was stagnation and death. As Professor Karlin reminds us, Proust offers a warning purists of any language, including Irish, would do well to heed.
Proust's English, By Daniel Karlin, Oxford University Press, 229pp. £25
Robert O'Byrne is a writer and journalist. His most recent book, Mind Your Manners: A Guide to Good Behaviour, is published by Sitric Press