Is 'Thanks to' a Gallicism to be avoided?

Question

I wrote the following sentence describing how a floating window is docked inside a parent window on a program's user interface

It usually shares this space with ArcMap’s TOC thanks to a tab at its bottom (Figure 7).

Looking at it, I wonder whether this is not a gallicism after "grâce à" and what a native speaker would have said (through, by means of, via?). The French constantly try to avoid Anglicisms in their language. The English seem rarely to bother about avoiding Gallicisms. Perhaps Gallicisms are just Norman English and upper class? Is "thanks to" correct usage in the cited sentence?

Answer 1

No, in this case there's nothing wrong with "thanks to", which is only slightly formal, and appropriate in almost any register. (One might even say "thanks to Jim and the sunscreen he brought, I didn't get a sunburn" or something of the sort in casual speech.)

You're right that English speakers rarely make any conscious effort to avoid Gallicisms, mostly because (at least in America) we don't actually tend to know what those even are. There are doubtless some constructs that sound odd to our ears that happen to mimic French constructs, but these days, it's a matter of unfamiliarity much more often than deliberate stylistic distinctions.