There's a lot of pseudo-English in German, though. The common German word for a cellphone is "Handy" and particularly in the former GDR, chicken meat is often called "Broiler". Both are obviously English words, but they aren't used that way in English.

That used to annoy me a bit (as a German), but it's actually quite resourceful from a linguistic point of view.

'Smoking' is another interesting pseudo-English German word.

Ahem, hand is a cognate of old German and Dutch ..

Also, the '-ing' part comes from the continent, as well. :)

Sure, there are lots of cognates. Some of the hardest to translate words are actually cognates.

For example it's almost impossible to properly translate the German word 'Brot' into English. It's a cognate of 'bread', but Germans mean something very different by 'Brot' than the British mean by 'bread'.

Loaning a word ad-hoc is much easier by comparison. Eg Bundeskanzler means exactly the same in English as it does in German. As does Prime Minister.

In defense of English speakers, one can use Spanish words relatively freely without seeming awkward: gracias, siesta, amigo, macho, etc.

It's worth pointing out that these are all practical day-to-day words. Perhaps the difference is there, also. Contrast cul-de-sac and ennui.

I think there is a certain stigma to English people using German words, on account of the fact that the nations have a long history of rivalry and open warfare against each other .. perhaps a linguist can pipe in and tell us if there was ever a period where Spanish words had a similar degree of stigma, after wars and so on ..

The Brits and the Germans historically got along like a house on fire during the vast majority of the last few hundred years. If anything, the stigma you talk about should exist between English and French.

Yes, I'm aware of that, I mean in the context of the last 100 years, apropos German-English, English-English, American-English, and so on. I think a bit of American vernacular has a German'ification phase, the languages seem to be intertwined, but this is just an opinion based on observation through personal life experience not some kind of academic point of view. I'd love to know the linguistics basis behind such intermingling.

I've seen some of what looked like Germanification of idioms. Eg 'couple' in British English seems to mean exactly two. In German 'paar' (lower cased!) is basically synonymous with 'a few', and the Americans seem to be using 'a couple' also in that wider sense?

That's easily complicated by the fact that the roots of the rivalry between France and England was in large part stoked by French-speaking Norman conquerors. Few native English speakers will read this paragraph and identify all these French-derived words as being 'French', since they have become such a plainly integral part of English:

complicate, fact, rivalry, part, conqueror, native, paragraph, identify, derive

TL;DR can't speak English without also speaking a bunch of French in the process, especially since French words represent all the elite, cultured words (e.g. 'cow' vs. 'beef')

It seems that "fact" doesn't belong in that list but rather it comes directly from medieval Latin

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fact

https://www.peigencihui.com/word/fact

The Norman conquest was way back, and wasn't even the latest invasion. (The Dutch conquered Britain in the meantime.)

The Norman conquest played a role, especially in language, but the later major power / colonial empire rivalry would have developed regardless of history, just dictated by geography and clashing interests.