| | A teacher recently
caused a ruckus by
suggesting that schools
abandon the attempt to
teach English kids what
one might call “BBC
English” and let kids go
“freeform”, spelling
words as they see fit.
The suggestion was that
having to learn all
these rules holds
English kids back
compared to foreign
students, who only have
to learn the
straightforward
orthography of languages
like Finnish or Italian,
and can then get on with
more important tasks
(like learning English).
There are a myriad of
objections to this, most
of which have been
rehearsed in the media
or are running through
your mind right now. The
key one, which has been
overlooked, is that the
whole idea is a
non-starter: you can’t
stop people from
following rules, least
of all children.
This might seem an
odd statement to make in
a society which is
allegedly coming apart
at the seams, and where
flouting authority of
every sort seems the
norm. But it’s true, and
especially so when it | |
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| | comes to language:
people need rules to
communicate, and if they
don’t know them
explicitly they will
construe them as best
they can.
Look at the
“greengrocer’s
apostrophe”, which so
concerns people like
Lynne Truss that whole
web forums have been set
up to monitor its
occurrence. This isn’t a
case of people lazily
ignoring a rule so much
as going out of their
way to try to follow
one. When I was young,
my local chemist’s
window advertised
“photo’s developed” –
not a mistake, but a
sign writer indicating
that he’d shortened
“photographs” to fit the
new service onto an
already crowded window.
What happened, I
suspect, was this:
passers-by, such as the
local greengrocer, saw
that the chemist dealt
in “photo’s” but not
“drug’s” and assumed
that such an educated
man was following a rule
they were unaware of,
which dealt with vowels
and plurals. So we got
“potato’s” and
“tomato’s” and then
“sandwich’s”, after
which the battle was | |
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| | pretty much lost.
This rule-inferring
behaviour is so inbuilt
we barely notice we are
doing it. But give the
kids free rein with
spelling for a few years
and the result would be
a whole new set of
“rules” of even more
Byzantine complexity
than our current ones.
It’s what we do. The
result is Babel: French
and Spanish may share a
common ancestor in
Latin, but they are
hardly simplified
versions, and are
mutually
incomprehensible.
In general, we only
notice most of the rules
when they fail us or
when others flout them.
Most of the conflict I
have witnessed in the
workplace came not out
of some huge ethical
collision but some minor
matter of etiquette –
and was no less violent
for that. We’re
currently living in a
situation where the
often unspoken rules
that we’ve deduced from
the world are suddenly
failing us. Property can
go down as well as up.
Banks can fail.
Successful chancellors
don’t always make good
prime ministers. Who | |
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| | told us that any of
these things were the
case? No-one – we just
inferred them, and
thought we’d discovered
the very fabric of
existence.
So what are the new
rules? Nobody ever got
fired for buying…what?
You can’t go wrong if
you invest in…?
Data is coming thick
and fast and already
people will be
constructing new rules.
Older people like me who
make great play of all
the recessions we’ve
experienced, will start
digging old rules out of
our databanks. And we’re
all going to come to
different conclusions.
The result, I fear,
will be Babel at the
business level: the
commonality of
expectations, of
behaviour, of language
that underlies business
interaction will begin
to erode. Cultures will
turn in on themselves,
become more
idiosyncratic. A
reduction in job
mobility will further
erode the interchange of
ideas between people.
Like the itinerant
scholars of old, | |
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| | consultants will
increasingly be the
carriers of information
and ideas between these
isolated cultures.
Maintaining a common
language – and
developing it to
encompass the new
realities that
businesses face – will
become as important a
part of consultancy as
the hands-on project
work.
Eventually new
paradigms will emerge
and we’ll all be able to
communicate with each
other again. “BBC
English”, now seen as
elitist and overly
rule-bound, was
originally developed as
a neutral way for the
nation to communicate
with itself that would
transcend the mutually
incomprehensibility of
our regional dialects.
Similarly
consultantese has
gained a not altogether
unjustified reputation
as obscurantist jargon.
Let’s try and change
that and develop a
lingua franca for
business that can unite,
rather than divide us. | |
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