“Twenty-five years ago ‘one’ came to England to escape Ersatz;” Ezra Pound explained in 1933, precisely twenty-five years after having moved to England himself. He continued as follows: “that is to say, whenever a British half-wit expressed an opinion, some American quarter-wit rehashed it in one of the ‘respectable’ American organs” (Selected Prose, 227). The irony, if not particularly subtle, still bears examination. If America, in accordance with the oldest of new-world, expatriate tropes, lags behind England in terms of culture, still one goes to the latter not to shun imitation and obtain the authentic cultural value, but rather to encounter the authentic cultural idiocy. One goes to England not for the cure, but rather to treat the heart of the disease instead of a far-flung symptom. Indeed, the word “organs” above needs to be read in all its corporeal and corporatist connotations, as Pound's very next sentence is, “Disease is more contagious than health” (227). Still, Pound's equating of England with the thing itself, the original and authentic rather than the derivation, imitation, and repetition, is unequivocal. No less so is the recourse to a foreign language for a word that expresses the secondary. As is so often the case for Pound, terminological precision demands a term which, neologism or foreign loan word, implies nothing so much as catachresis. “Ersatz” is nothing but the ersatz of a missing English word, invoked in a discussion of English authenticity. Language, authenticity, the foreign, and the question of origins are all neatly woven together here.