Many people think the term arose because of the dominance of French in diplomatic circles, but I t's actually quite apropos; "lingua franca" is an early medieval term that essentially translates to "language of the Western Europeans" ("Franca" in this context is not modern France, but a term for historical Germany -- everything north of modern Spain, essentially). In the day, lingua franca was a patois consisting of bits of various languages that all traders in the region knew and could communicate in, though it was too mutable to be a stable language as such. Not unlike English, actually!

I had always just assumed it meant "French" so you got me reading (thanks!). Wiki seems to indicate the original lingua franca was based on the language of the Franks and mostly used in the eastern Med.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

It helps that English adapts to the current zeitgeist relatively fast and can kind of act as an ombudsman for the spreading of news concepts and ideas to other languages.

Yes. Just ignore people's schadenfreude. They behave like in kindergarten. Just slalom through the maelstrom of lemmings that they are.

Ok, I took it too far. I'll go have a lager now.

True, it does seem like a contradictory sentence. Here, I'll fix it: "English is the common language of the world." :)