Origin
The word barbarism was originally used by the Greeks for foreign terms used in their language. ("Barbarism" is related to the word "barbarian"; the ideophone "bar-bar-bar" was the Ancient Greek equivalent of modern English "blah-blah-blah", meant to sound like gibberish — hence the negative connotation of both barbarian and barbarism). As such, Anglicisms in other languages, or Gallicisms (such as using the verb to assist to mean to be present at, cf. the French assister), Germanisms, Hispanisms, and so forth in English can also be construed as examples of barbarisms.
Read more about this topic: Barbarism (linguistics)
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