WRITING STYLE AND THE CURSE OF MULTILINGUALISM
"Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance," said Henry Watson Fowler in his The King's English; "Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words” offered William Strunk and Elwyn Brooks White in The Elements of Style. Good advice if you're Aelthelred the Unready, Edmund the First, or Alfred the Great, but much more difficult to follow if you're a native speaker of the bastardized English language of the early 21st century.

If you also try to "use short words" rather than "utilize condensed vocabulary" then there's a fair chance you're going to be opting for the Anglo-Saxon by default. Apparently, in the early days of English, folks were a lot dimmmer and grunting out single syllable words was about the limits of their lingusitic capacity.

Following the arrival of those awful Latin types - Eyetalians and Frenchies - the intelligensia of the day (those with teeth and who didn't always smell of shit) began to pontificate extensively by exercising vernacular of a polysyllabic nature. No more "Oy, dick weed - shift your wagon" but a more gentile "peasant, remove thy vehicle from my immediate presence."

Invasion after invasion tossed new and even more exotic words into the nascent language until it became the lingua franca of today, resplendent in its many variations.

So expecting the average person to know whether a word derives from Anglo-Saxon or Arabic is optimistic. How about the origins of the hangings in the following Rogues Gallery?

alcohol, bandit, boulder, duck, history, hurricane, kidney, tomato, tulip, umbrella, wagon, window, zero.

How did you do? Here are the answers:

Arabic: alcohol, zero
Danish: boulder, kidney, window
Dutch: duck, wagon
Greek: history
Italian: bandit, umbrella
Spanish: hurricane, tomato
Turkish: tulip

No, the Bystander did not pluck these straight from his head - he's not that smart. But then again who is? Apart from a handful of academics and the various staff members working on the world's great dictionaries, who needs to know?

So go ahead and write as you need to write. English is a patchwork quilt of words forged in the fires of Empire, constantly changing with every breath a speaker takes. If you can't find the Anglo-Saxon, just make do with the English.