One of the advantages of having been invaded multiple times - by the Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans - is that English has one of the largest vocabularies of any language in the world. While foreign armies were pillaging our towns, we were pillaging their languages for extra words. But despite its resulting linguistic richness, there are still some significant things that English lacks a word for. We Brits have always been good at inventing things (the steam engine, television, the jet engine, the world wide web etc), yet we don’t have our own word for entrepreneur and have had to import a French term. On the other hand there are gaps in our lexicon that we should be quite pleased about: schadenfreude, for example - the taking of pleasure in someone else’s misfortune - is on loan from German. Well, we wouldn’t want to admit that it’s within our national sensibility to be so mean-spirited, so it’s good that I can blame it on the Germans when I find myself - as I have recently - taking a quiet personal satisfaction in the fall from grace of Bitcoin and Dubai.