Archives for category: Language
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

What Brits Mean When They Say…

April 6, 2016 //
0

I’ve always prided myself on being honest and saying what’s on my mind. Not necessarily framed in a hurtful or undiplomatic manner, but one that leaves no room for misunderstanding. After all, people, especially customers, need to know what you’re thinking. They also need to be advised what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

It turns out, of course, that the Brits have long been guilty of not exactly saying what they mean, as the table here will testify. I’m indebted to James Trezona of Rooster Punk for drawing my attention to this table, though the version I’ve shown is borrowed from here. In this sense it would seem that the Brits are similar to other peoples, like the Japanese for example, in eschewing direct feedback.

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

 

I do think, though, that this British habit of hiding behind the nuances of the mother tongue is gradually dying out. You could put this down to a bunch of mega trends I guess: globalisation, American cultural influences, the erosion of the British class system, our increasing inclination not to waste precious free time, to name but a few.

If it’s not dying out, then it’s certainly lessening from a bracing wind to a gentle breeze.

Or maybe something else is at work here? Maybe we’re not very good at delivering bad news. Maybe we’re too willing to soften the blow for our audience and ourselves. Either way, I think we’re getting better at that too.

There is, however, still sufficient truth in the table, and sufficient difference between what Brits say and what they mean – and differences between two situations is of course the root of humour – for it to be seriously funny.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales

The Destruction Manual

March 30, 2016 //
0

A funny thing happened the other day. A guy I know – I play soccer with him a couple times a month and would know him as an acquaintance rather than a friend – came to service our gas central heating system.

In he breezed, and asked me if I had the ‘destruction’ manual for the boiler. He probably gets to say it numerous times a week to break the ice with the customer and it made me smile as I handed over the instruction manual – to use its more common moniker.

Within 5 minutes the system had switched on of its own accord without the controller computer telling it to – not good – and ten minutes later the fuse blew on the system and shorted the circuit for the utility room.

He had indeed used the destruction manual to destroy the central heating.

It got me thinking about something I learned about early on in my managerial career, namely the self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the notion that your attitude towards an impending situation can often govern how it turns out. If you think a meeting’s going to go badly, it probably will. If you go in with a positive mindset, you tend to get a positive outcome. Clearly there’s some cause and effect at work here.

It follows, therefore, that a positive disposition is always worth the effort, as it will help the end result favour you and also perhaps rub off on others as well.

Tags
Categories Communication, Customers, Language

Complementary Compliments

February 10, 2016 //
0

Here are two words that tend to be confused – not the words themselves, of course, I’m sure they know what they mean and how to spell themselves – in certain circumstances.

Take the old-fashioned compliments slip, used to add one’s good wishes or hello to an item sent to someone. And we know someone is being complimentary about us when they say nice things. All good so far.

Then there’s complement and complementary. I first came across the word complement in a Latin lesson where it was used to describe, for example, the word ‘good’ in a sentence like ‘the boy is good,’ where the adjective carried the same case as the noun, as though the phrase was actually ‘the good boy.’ With me so far?

The confusion arises when you consider the word complementary/complimentary. The former completes or supports something, the latter says something nice.

So imagine my consternation when I was invited to a complimentary webinar the other day. I was about to scoff in contempt, thinking, ‘I doubt this is a webinar where they’re going to say nice things about me.’ Surely they’re offering a complementary webinar, where the webinar supports the product I’ve just bought?

But then, I thought, maybe they did mean complimentary, in a sense that the webinar was free, gratis, for nothing. I had to grudgingly give them the benefit of the doubt. Coulda gone either way.

I know, I should get out more, it’s true…

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Language

Enough to be Dangerous

January 13, 2016 //
0

Ah, it’s a terribly fine line sometimes. A coin toss if you will. A little knowledge can be all you need to get you started, get some forward momentum and learn as you go. Sometimes it’s all the time you have, otherwise you miss the boat.

Then again, it’s not coincidental that we use the phrase ‘enough to be dangerous’.

A couple of decades ago, a friend of a friend of mine went to live with a Spanish-speaking family to improve his basic language skills. In his first week there, they went out to dinner together. The daughter was 17. During the course of the conversation something was said to make her blush. He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know the Spanish for embarrassed so took a guess. Worse still, his effort – embarazada – means pregnant. Not good. The father went apoplectic and he had to leave the family shortly thereafter.

Knowing enough cuts both ways. Ask yourself this, do you feel lucky? 🙂

Tags
Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Write What You Know

November 16, 2015 //
0

Here’s a pretty obvious thought for you: write about what you know.

It’s the advice that would be novelists always receive, and in fact it applies to anyone in the creative space.

Once in a while you get insights from the really good writers into how this applies to them. I remember Ricky Gervais giving the perfect illustration of this from when he was a budding writer at school, and clearly it has served him well from that moment on.

I recently finished reading an early crime thriller by American author Michael Connelly. It was his first book featuring the detective Harry Bosch. The Bosch series is now at about 20-plus and growing. At the end of the book, Connelly explained how his eponymous character came about, and it was essentially the melding of 3 or 4 important influences on him when he was growing up. As simple as that.

It’s the same for business of course. Write about you know. Otherwise, you’ll be found out. If you don’t know, find out and get the facts, so you do know what you’re talking about.

I find that when I’m researching something that’s new to me, so that I can write compellingly about it, the more people I speak to the better, up to a point. It’s like a reverse onion. With every new person you talk to, you get a new layer, a fresh perspective, a different angle on what you thought you knew, until you have as full a picture as you’re going to get without the decreasing marginal returns of going to more people.

Then you can write, because you know.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Strategy

Clever vs Smart

September 28, 2015 //
0

I’m supposed to be clever. At least that’s what my academic results tell me, and what people occasionally mention.

My wife is smart. Street-wise. She has lots of ‘cop on’, as the Irish would say. I think it’s better to be smart. Being clever, or having intelligence, is an absolute thing, measurable on a scale. You can’t do that much with it on its own.

Being smart is applying intelligence, putting a degree of cleverness to use. Being smart is seeing the importance of a pattern, not simply the pattern itself. Being smart is the ability to see through a problem and find a solution quickly.

I should have figured this out sooner, but I’m not that smart…

Tags , ,
Categories General, Language

The Physical Spell-Checker

September 25, 2015 //
0

IMG_3535Where’s a physical spell checker – otherwise known as a dictionary, which nobody carries any more – when you need one? I remember about 20-some years ago in the US I saw a ticket tout with a sign saying ‘I wont (sic) tickets’.

Here’s a picture of a slightly more recent gaffe.

Online spell-checking tools in our email and document creation applications make it easy for us to avoid elementary blunders. They’re like calculators though, they make us lazy with our command of the basic skills of literacy and numeracy.

It’s OK to make these mistakes verbally, because it’s a different language to the written form and no-one can read what you say. Not so when your output is codified for all to see.

We can’t always rely on our friends to put us right on our mistakes. We have to do the work ourselves, or risk being found out.

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language

Two Years of Blogging

September 2, 2015 //
2

Two years ago today I published my first blog post on ‘Paul Dilger’s blog – Musings on stuff I come into contact with.’ I committed to do 3 posts a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, going out between 7:30 and 8:30 am London/Dublin time, regular as clockwork. It didn’t seem worth the commitment to do one when I felt like it, since that would degenerate into one a month, and pretty soon none a month.

Two years later, and some 300-plus posts later, it’s still going strong, regular as clockwork. I like to think that I’m still true to the values from the early days: mostly sales and marketing stuff, posts that take a maximum of 2-3 minutes to read – rather than 10 seconds or half your morning – and posts that I hope interest and enable people.

It serves as the chief dollop of fresh content for my business web site, but it doesn’t feel like work. I really enjoy writing the posts, and I know the discipline of creating them is good for me.

I hope you enjoy dipping into them as well. Here’s to the next post :-).

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

The One Thing a Good Marketer Must Have

August 24, 2015 //
0

The one thing a good marketer should have is – a good eye.

A good eye for what looks good. Good marketers know good design when they see it. They appreciate a well designed page, product, thing. They know what to look for and they know how to brief others to create ‘good’.

A good eye for detail. The devil is in the detail, which means he – or she – is in the data, the words, the images, the emotions.

A good idea for what reads well and sounds good – for which you probably need a good ear too. Remember that what reads well and what sounds good are not the same thing. You’ll find few good marketers who are not good communicators, not good at writing, not good at speaking, not good at listening.

You can learn to get a good eye, you don’t have to be born with it. But you must have this one thing to be good.

 

Categories Communication, General, Language, Marketing, Planning

Copacetic? Me Neither

August 21, 2015 //
0

As a marketer, writer and communicator, I love words. They’re what I do.

The other day I was flicking through a daily mood flip board that my wife gave me a while back. It has a huge range of one word, one emoticon options that sum up – and signal to others – how you feel that day.

I eventually settled on ‘subversive’ – it was a Friday after all – but I digress.

I came across the word ‘copacetic’. Ever seen or heard of it? Me neither. With my background in Latin and Greek I can sometimes figure out a word’s rough meaning from the roots, but not this time.

Turns out it’s a North American colloquialism meaning ‘OK’, with an unclear heritage.

Great word, isn’t it? A new one for us European English speakers to throw into the conversation.

 

Tags ,
Categories Communication, General, Language
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »