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Authority Signals and Mis-Signals

April 23, 2014 //
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It’s interesting how we’re conditioned to behave according to certain authority signals. A uniform, a whistle, a type of hat, whatever it might be, we interpret them as cues that someone is in charge, or supposed to be, or wants us to think they are.

We’ve all seen the tour guides wielding their umbrellas and clip boards like ceremonial symbols of governmental power. “Blue group! Blue group! I’ve got a clip board and I’m not afraid to use it!”

In the 1980’s and 90’s, before there was a computer on every desk, we lived in a world of paper. A sure-fire way to look busy and shirk work was to wander from office to office carrying a sheaf of papers. “Yes, that’s right, terribly important, just personally delivering this vital piece of information.”

It’s not just authority uniforms that we have an acquired, automatic response to. You can make the same argument for all kinds of uniforms. People of a criminal or ne’erdowell disposition rely on these signals to gain access to our house without raising suspicions – sometimes when we are home, but usually when we’re not – and take our belongings. Sometimes artists who like to remain aloof use them as well to preserve their anonymity.

I remember a few years ago my wife, who at the time was a stay-at-home Mum in a rather nice 18th century rented cottage in southern England, spotted a man approach our dwelling during the day in a van, get out in running gear, come over to our house and pretend to do some stretches for jogging while all the time peering into our windows and ‘casing the joint’, before walking ten yards back to his car to drive off again. You’d never think someone purportedly out for a jog was engaged in a job of another kind.

Uniforms and other signals lead us to think in a certain way.  They can also mis-lead us, to our cost.

 

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Categories Communication, General, Language

The Global Phenomenon That Is Paddy’s Day

March 28, 2014 //
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I can’t explain it either, but it’s fascinating.

Why is St Patrick’s Day celebrated in such style and with such fervour in so many places around the world? Ireland boasts a diaspora of 70 million people, but that can’t be anywhere near the largest. Only the Chinese New Year comes close, and we’re talking about a national powerhouse of 1.4bn souls, fully 350 times Ireland’s population.

Paddy’s Day – and that’s not a pejorative term by the way, not is it ever St Patty’s Day, my American friends – doesn’t even occur on the weekend most of the time, yet still hundreds of thousands of Americans take a holiday to celebrate it and their Irish ancestry.

Ireland – and I’m talking about the Republic here; I’m mildly embarrassed to admit I don’t know much about Northern Ireland, except that it has great tourism advertising – seems to have cultivated the art of charming the pants off you while taking ever so small liberties. For example:

– a corporate tax rate that is the envy of most countries except the ‘offshore’ ones and the bane of the EU’s life

– peaceful nation status with a peace-keeping force, for the best of both worlds

– a genuinely warm welcome unless you’re English (an 800-year reversal of fortunes, let’s not go there) and then if you are it’s a genuinely warm welcome until they know you better

– the high wire act of leveraging a world renowned stout without getting bogged down by unhelpful links to alcohol and its abuse

– genuinely friendly and talkative while also using swear words like definite articles

– cutting edge in areas of business like IT, and antediluvian in its tolerance and memory of shady business and political practices

– great on innovation and entrepreneurship, less so on infrastructure and healthcare

– lovely scenery, without ever being out-of-this-world lovely as boasted by other countries 

For all these reasons Ireland is the most transportable of brands and punches way above its weight in cultural and touristic terms. How this translates into the global transplanting of Paddy’s Day once a year – beats me. I do love living here though…

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Categories General, Language, Marketing, Technology

Full Stops

March 10, 2014 //
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The full stop, preferable to a comma according to the good folks from Coldplay, is also called a period by our US friends.  Period has never really caught on as a term in the British-English speaking world, perhaps due to its association with what the older generation called ‘women’s things.’

On the surface, a full stop is a pretty easy concept.  You use it to finish a clause or a series of clauses and give the reader chance to pause for longer than they might at a comma. When you’re writing for business, though, sometimes it’s tough to know when you really should use a full stop, especially when you have bullet points or indented paragraphs. Super formal documents, like those produced by Her Majesty’s Civil Service, are very formal:

– they have a comma at the end of each bullet,

– until they get to the last bullet,

– and then they finish it with a full stop.

My own preference is not to use anything at the end of bulleted text, even at the end of the last bullet:

– it looks neater

– it’s also easier for me.  Even if it’s a longer bullet with a couple of sentences in, I still don’t put a stop at the end of the bullet

– it allows me to use this convention both for short bullet comments and longer indented paragraphs

Whatever you decide, make sure you consistently apply the convention through your document.

In the normal parts of a document, of course, you should have a full stop at the end of each paragraph. It’s not a luxury you can do without, as a former colleague of mine is fond of arguing. And that former colleague knows who they are :-).

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Categories Communication, Language

The One Criteria That Gives You Away

March 7, 2014 //
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Singulars and plurals: they’re usually really easy to differentiate, but sometimes they make you look like you’re not in command of your native language.

The most common one I hear in a business context is ‘criteria’. It catches folk out all the time. You see, criteria is a plural, and it’s not the kind of plural you can use in a singular context, like ‘data’ for example. You often hear criteria coupled with ‘success’, a popular entry in bullsh*t bingo.

So you have one criterion, from the Latin criterium and before that the old Greek kriterion, and you have multiple criteria from the Latin – you guessed it – criteria. Data has the same latin origins, but it’s so much part of our everyday language that it’s morphed into a collective singular noun and it’s quite acceptable to say ‘the data is awful’ for example.

Not so with criteria. You’ll hear even senior people in an organisation saying ‘which particular success criteria is the most important?’, which gives them away. Of course, mine’s the stiffer upper lip British diagnosis of the word. In other English-speaking territories, they’ve taken a slightly more lenient view. Then again you’ll sometimes hear people talk about the many criterias you can select from, yikes…

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Categories Communication, General, Language

Announcing a New Dictionary Word – The Drummernumber

February 21, 2014 //
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In the last of this week’s posts loosely grouped around respect – or sometimes lack of respect – for the customer, I offer you a new word. A good friend of mine recently opined over a good glass of chianti (not, I might add, a contradiction in terms), “I reckon we should add a new word to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s the Drummernumber.”

Continuing in the best tradition of coining words after people, like malapropism and bowdlerise, these four gloriously euphonous syllables reference a certain David Drumm, erstwhile CEO of Anglo Irish Bank. As I write this, three of Mr Drumm’s colleagues are on trial for allegedly suspicious loans they made on the bank’s behalf in late 2008.

So why the connection to Mr Drumm? Well, according to a colleague of his in taped conversations between senior members of the bank which found their way into Irish national newspaper the Independent, Mr Drumm had a fondness for making up numbers, except that it was phrased in the manner of someone dextrously plucking the number out of one of the more notorious part of their anatomy.

The number in question was the amount the bank needed from the government to bail it out. The plucked number and the actual number were considerably apart. I remember from my MBA days the Japanese practice of multiplying by SIX the initial estimate of the financial cost of an incident to arrive at the more likely eventual number. This is the sort of scale we’re talking about here.

Now some of you will have heard the business joke, ‘Did you know that [insert percentage of your choice] of all statistics are made up on the spot?’ which plays with the idea that statistics help to illustrate or strengthen an argument so it’s better to make one up than not have one. The event that I refer to, however, which had major ramifications for the Irish tax payer, takes the process to a whole new level.

So, expect to see the following entry in the dictionary before too long:

“Drummernumber [drum-er-nuhm-ber] noun. 1, A number which has been made up in order to advance an argument or secure approval. Also colloquially referred to as ‘a number I picked out of my a**e’. Attributed to Mr David Drumm, former CEO, Anglo Irish Bank, q.v.'”

Who knows how the trial will turn out, but this quote-unquote that we coin here is allegedly a small episode within an allegedly colossal disrespecting of – and ultimate failing of – hundreds of thousands of tax-paying customers.

And as for Drummernumber: you heard it here first. Allegedly.

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Categories Language, Strategy

The Irony of the Diphthong

January 29, 2014 //
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Diphthong is an odd word. It means two distinct vowel sounds together. A lot of vowel combinations – like ‘means’ in the previous sentence, or the ‘ou’ of ‘previous’ in this one – are just one sound without the mouth changing shape. Some, though, need you to enunciate the change quite markedly.

I don’t think the wikipedia entry above is particularly good, but I give it anyway for background. For me a good example of a diphthong is where you hear Liam Gallagher pronounce words like ‘imaginasheeun‘ on the rather stupendous Cigarettes and Alcohol.

Regardless of how you define or exemplify a diphthong, I think it’s more than a touch ironic that the word diphthong itself has four consonants in a row. Four consonants together, you don’t see that very often. Rather like the word naphthalene that I remember from my school physics days.

Perhaps I should get out more…

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Categories Language

The Trickiness of German Genders

January 27, 2014 //
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Those of you for whom English is a first language will know the challenges of wrestling with your maiden second language, because the chances are it embraces the whole new world of gender. We speakers of English only really come across gender in words like waiter/waitress, actor/actress and master/mistress.

To my mind this is just a vocab thing, since our pronouns – ‘the’, ‘a’ and so on – and adjectives – big, small, you know the deal – don’t have to ‘agree’ with the noun – tree, house, stop me if I’m going too slowly here. Besides, our US friends have largely abandoned the female forms of these words anyway.

Your romance languages introduce the notion of gender as reflected in the noun, like le fils, la fille, and in any adjectives or verb parts related to those nouns, as in Il a sauvé la petite fille blessée – he saved the little injured girl. Sorry, a bit macabre, but all I think of on the hoof. Then there’s German, not content with 2 genders, which introduces the 3rd gender of neuter, not to be confused with a recent German initiative to introduce a 3rd gender for humans – and don’t ask me how your adjectives and verbal adjectives are going to deal with that conundrum.

Remembering and using the right genders with the tens of thousands of words in the language is a tall order even for those schooled in it from birth, never mind us folks shambling through a sentence or two in the hope we get served the right drink, meal or hotel room. As a case in point, I offer you the German for knife, fork and spoon.

Now knife, fork and spoon for me fall into a natural notional group – eating implements.  So in the interests of facilitating the speaking of the language they should all have the same gender signifier in my view. Is that the case in practice? No. Far too easy.

Knife is Das Messer, neuter. Fork is Die Gabel, feminine. Spoon is Der Löffel, masculine. Go figure. You see, it appears that German doesn’t follow a natural ‘genderising’ process for its words. For example, ‘Wo ist das Mädchen? Es ist sehr klein’. ‘Where is the girl? She is very little.’ The word for girl is neuter, hence the words Das, Es – which also means it – and the neuter adjective klein. As a poor speaker of German, I’m indebted to this book for putting me right on this vexing topic.

Tricky one, huh? It almost militates against the natural growth of the language. At least we don’t have to worry too much in a world governed – for now – by business Americanish.

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Categories Language

Rogue Apostrophe’s Need to be Herded out of Town

December 16, 2013 //
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I’ve touched on our troubles with apostrophes in a previous post. Sometimes these rogue apostrophes appear in content without reason. Lest we forget, apostrophes can only be used for 2 principal reasons:

1) To signify possession, as in Paul’s house is rather small

2) To signify a missing letter, as in Paul’s a rather small man

As I’ve touched on in the previous post, you don’t need one when you’re using plurals with nothing possessed. The trees were swaying, for example. But you do see apostrophes with nouns, so the confusion is perhaps understandable.

Not so when you see the howler of an apostrophe with a verb. Just the other day I was reading a press release from a company I admire, and presumably it was written by someone who writes for a living. It began as follows: “Today see’s the launch of …”

What?! On what planet does that make sense? Hell’s bell’s … 🙂

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Categories Communication, Language

Do You Use Proper Words in Your Mobile Texts?

December 13, 2013 //
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Are you a stickler for the correct grammar, spelling and punctuation in your text-based conversations? What about abbreviations? Expedience and convenience over accuracy?

I suspect this boils down to which generation we fall into; whether we were born into a mobile texting generation or were adults before their advent.

I remember being slightly horrified when I texted the babysitter to see if she was available to look after the little angels one night a few years ago. She replied back ‘Ye dats fine.’ I remember wondering if she wrote her schoolwork that way. For her I suspect it was just a case of adopting the shorthand of the high frequency texter.

I send a few more texts than I used to, but I still feel that even though it’s a conversational medium I’m being judged on the output of its written counterpart. I might even be the only person that uses a semi-colon when it’s called for.

Wots ur vew?

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Categories Communication, Language

Folk’s Drive Me Mad with Their Punctuation Sometimes

December 6, 2013 //
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Why oh why, dear reader, do folks put an apostrophe before the ‘s’ in your common-or-garden plural?

As we’ve talked about before, an apostrophe only ever signifies possession, as in the dog’s bone, or a missing letter or letters, as in the dog’s got a bone which is short for the dog has got a bone. But to start a sentence with ‘The teacher’s taught the pupils’ betrays an alarming lack of knowledge of that simple rule.

While we’re on the subject of plurals and apostrophes, let me just remind those unsure of how the possessives work with singular and plural nouns. The apostrophe goes immediately after the thing or things doing the possessing. So we write the dog’s bone, but the parents’ association. Where it gets confusing is where the thing doing the possessing has a built-in plural. So, we say the children’s toys, the and the couple’s daughter, but the couples’ children when it’s more than one couple doing the possessing :-). And then we get onto ‘folk’, from the German word volk, meaning people. Some people prefer to say folk, some say folks, so where do you put the apostrophe then? Wherever you like in my view.

Like I say, folk’s punctuation drives me mad…

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Categories Communication, Language
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