What I’d like is a person who uses cool foreign words but explains them. Then I learn a new word and don’t feel stupid.
I have a friend who’ll use the perfect word (that anyone could figure out from context) and follow it with “…as they say in France.”
So I spice mine up a bit with him and get more geographically-clever: "Okay, I am marre… as the peasants in Provance say when they can’t take any more of this merde."
Growing up I thought pee and poop were bad words and always said *shishi *and *unko * instead. One of my favorite phrases I didn’t learn until my teens is “I need to 544 (go shi shi)!”
Speaking of Italian, I somehow grew up with “kuh-peesh” (capisci, I assume) for “do you understand”? I don’t think there were a lot of Italians in my neighborhood growing up – in fact, I can only think of one – but “kuh-peesh” was commonly used by the old-timers, so I remember and use it to this day.
I mix and match sometimes, but the non-English words I’m most likely to use are a) food related (I learned to cook Indian food largely from visiting my husband’s family in India) and b) occasional Spanish/French/Italian randomness when I’m teasing my kids.
So, cooking/food words - methi (fenugreek), khala (cumin seed), different types of dahl (lentils, like channa (chickpeas), toor (pidgeon peas), urad (black lentils)), tawa (griddle), kuturi (small bowl), proper names of Indian dishes, etc.
Spanish and/or French words/phrases - Que triste, tan lacrimoso! How sad.
Ma petit chou or ma petit chou-chou - my little cream puff, my little cabbage
And other random shit I say to my kids.
Oh, we also call my daughter chuckli (I don’t think I spelled that right) which is Gujurati for sparrow, the nickname her great grandmother gave her and there are a few other random Gujurati phrases I’ve picked up that come in handy when yelling at my husband’s uncle’s dog.
Unless I have to take a call in another language or am speaking with my brother in law about something I don’t want my kids to hear, I don’t tend to speak non-English outside a family setting. It’s kind of pretentious and it’s not like I can’t remember the English word, I just don’t happen to use it most of the time because a) I learned the word in a different language first or b) it’s most likely to get me understood or c) it’s just become habit.
When I went to school, I overheard a fellow student (Francophone primary, but also spoke English) swearing to herself in English. I asked why in English, and she said French swear words are “church” words (eg chalice, tabernacle, etc) and they didn’t feel strong enough.
A lot of languages make useful distinctions that English doesn’t, or does only awkwardly. For instance, I’ve been known to clarify “hot”, when referring to food, as either “caliente” or “picante”. It’s a lot easier to say that the chili is too caliente to eat, than to say “It’s too hot, I mean as in literally hot, not spicy, but it’ll cool down in a few minutes”.
And of course, languages are full of loanwords, from when enough people thought that the foreign word worked better than anything their language already had to offer. I think English probably takes on loanwords more than the average language, but all do it.
When I was in college I had a lot of Jewish friends, some of whom had grown up in Yiddish speaking households. So I learned and started saying putz (jerk) and schmaltzy (overly emotional) and quite a few others.
Nowadays I’ll occasionally throw out a short phrase by accident or just to be weird in one of the non English languages I speak. Allons-y (French for Let’s go) for example.
I use regularly use some Italian phrases and swear words I picked up from my mother, an Italian immigrant. I hate the English “turd” and use strunzi instead. Technically, strunzi is plural, but in my mom’s dialect, it’s singular as well. There are too many others to list, but I use “Madonn’!” a lot, again because I grew up hearing it.
I use teleferico - as do my sister and our father - which is an aerial cablecar. Aerial tramway. Whatever it’s called because it has so many other names and because teleferico is the word I learned for it first. N.B. I know there is supposed to be an accent but I haven’t figured out how to do one on my kindle.