Three men and two women in their early twenties are sitting next to me in the Kolding Caffe. They must be students from one of the neighboring buildings, where there are several departments from diferent faculties of the University of Zagreb. I am paying them little attention, but my ears perk up whenever I hear an English word or expression. And they use them every few seconds. Excluding the names of movies, songs, or websites, I have picked up a whole bunch of surprising words and expressions in the last few minutes: benchmark, gay, sorry, six pack, cash, zombie, trailer, lifestyle, window, bad, happy end, okay, video game, friend, forget it, headquarter… A Croatian linguist sitting in my chair would be livid by now. “As though we don’t have all these words and expressions in our own beautiful language,” he would mumble to himself before getting up and stomping out in a fury. As for me, I am delighted by the malleability of language. Any language. I only wonder when Chinese words and expressions will start popping up left and right in the Kolding Caffe.