Can consultantese evolve into a lingua franca?

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 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 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 pretty much lost.

This rule-inferring behaviour is so inbuilt we barely notice we are doing it. But give the kids free reign 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 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.

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