English and borrowing

…The computer connection with this one is that it comes from Mr Verb, a language / linguistics blog that is in my feed reader, filed in the language folder. Still, items like this signal the CLW's return to language topics. 
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Got a request to comment on the source of this quote ... now available on t-shirts, etc. It's famous but I couldn't remember offhand when the message came where it was from. As many readers will recall faster than I did, it's from Jame Nicoll and widely quoted (see here). The full quote, which floats around in a set of variants, is richer: