This paper centers on pragmatic borrowings from English into Finnish, including pliis (‘please’), oh my god, and about. The debate accounts for the social, pragmatic, semantic and grammatical incorporation of these components into Finnish, showing that the borrowed forms have features which are different from both the source language (English) as well as heritage form in the recipient language (Finnish). Included in the debate of these forms is a presented trajectory for how such borrowings enter into native discourse, and the success vs. defect of pragmatic borrowings in entering conventional discourse.