Grandparenting summer

It’s been a good summer, enriched by some immersion grandparenting.

That included two short experiments that together represented a big step forward in our grandparenting practice. Twice over the summer, the grandkids stayed with us for two nights, without their parents. And it worked out well. On each occasion, there was one night when Elliott woke up and demanded attention, but not for too long either time. On the other night of each stay, both kids slept right through. 

The time will come when they can stay with us for a longer period, giving their parents a break and, who knows, maybe even allowing us to take them on holiday somewhere. Perhaps to France. They both hold French nationality and, in a statement of surprising understanding, Matilda has let us know she wants to be better acquainted with the country and its language. When Danielle and I first met, it was French that we spoke to each other, and occasionally we fall into it again.

“Why are you speaking French?” Matilda often challenges us if she hears it.

It impresses me that she even recognises the language. And I can’t help feeling that behind her comment lies the implication, “I don’t want to be left out, I want to understand”. We’ll have to see what we can do when she’s a little older.

Matilda on her pedal bike
You think she doesn’t look happy? She wasn’t.
Her words after I took this picture were, “I don’t want photos.”

The big thing this summer has been the bikes. As I explained before, Matilda received her first pedal bike for her birthday in August. It’s quite clear that using a balance bike, the kind that has kids pushing themselves along with their feet on the ground, teaches them how to cycle much more effectively than using a pedal bike with training wheels. That was certainly clear when I saw her last week, at her home in Hoyo de Manzanares, near Madrid. She’s mastered both getting started (while with us, she still needed a push) and stopping (she now uses a brake and gets her feet on the ground, instead of falling over pretty much every time she came to a halt). And, boy, does she get some speed up in between.

Matilda running on the rocks outside her school

“Me too, me too,” says Elliott

The real problem is that Elliott, who has always wanted to do anything that Matilda could do, at the same time as she learned to do it – walking, running, talking – naturally wants to use a pedal bike too, even though he isn’t quite two and a half years old yet. His dad bought one for him, but he bought it from someone near us in Valencia, and it’s at our place until we find a way of getting it to him. In the meantime, Elliott has to beg his sister for some time to use her bike. When he does get to use it, he’s quite remarkable – I timed him keeping going for ten or fifteen minutes. That may be partly because he hasn’t yet fully mastered stopping, but it’s still remarkable.

Matilda’s pedal bike
“Me too, me too,” says Elliott

Language is the other area where the kids have bowled me over. Their mastery of Spanish can only leave me consumed by envy. But their English also just gets better and better, not just in the words but in the thinking behind them. 

“I like coming to Valencia,” Matilda told me.

I felt quite flattered, a feeling that lasted only until she could finish her remark.

“Because,” she went on, “we get ice cream every day here.”

There was ice cream on only one occasion last week, when I was with them. That’s ‘parents’ rules’. Sheena, my daughter-in-law, tells me that she regards us as applying ‘grandparents’ rules’. The latter are seriously more grandchild indulgent (and possibly grandparent-peace-purchasing).

The other enjoyable thing about being in our place is that they get to see trains going by from time to time. They call each one they see a ‘chu-chu-bahnele’, which is the equivalent in Danielle’s mother tongue, Alsatian, of what we might call a choo-choo-train. 

For the avoidance of confusion, Alsatian in this context has nothing to do with a breed of dogs, and everything to do with the language spoken in Danielle’s birth region of Alsace, in Eastern France.

Why do I find the use of Alsatian so enjoyable? Because it was what Danielle used when pointing out trains to our kids, when they were of that age. And she used it with our friends’ kids too. 

Now Elliott will cry out “chu-chu-bahnele” whenever we see so much as the railway track (well, strictly speaking it’s a metro track, but it feels like a railway since it’s all above ground near where we live. He doesn’t make the distinction, so nor do we). 

As it happens, with him the fascination seems to be just part of a general interest in alternative means of travel to cars.

“Plane! Plane!” he’ll say whenever he sees or hears one passing overhead.

They’re both beginning to grasp some of the subtler distinctions of language. For instance, they never want anything. They always need it. After all, a want can be denied. But a need? Well, it just has to be satisfied, doesn’t it? 

That slippage between terms, by the way, is by no means limited to children.

Chupa chups, as they call them, or lollipops as I would, are the object of one of those needs. Fulfilled, it creates considerable delight. It was, on one occasion, even under parents’ rules, in Hoyo, while I was there. 

Chupa chup moment, with Michael-Michael
After Edward Hopper

The event gave me the opportunity to take a photo of them in pensive enjoyment of their Chupa chup moment, along with a highly welcome visitor, their Uncle Michael. Or Michael-Michael, as they continue to call him. The moment with him and their chupa-chups gave me the opportunity to take a photo I felt had a bit of the wistful, enigmatic mood of an Edward Hopper painting to it.

The moment also has rarity value. A visit by Michael-Michael is received with such unconfined joy that, as a rule, we would certainly not apply words like peaceful to the scene that ensues.

High delight - literally, too - when Michael-Michael visits

And there were other special moments for the kids in the course of the summer. Their Granny flew down to join us from her home in Belfast, in Northern Ireland.

Matilda enjoying her granny’s presence

It was with their granny that they got to satisfy yet another need, the well-known requirement of the human soul to bathe from time to time in foam. A fine way to spend a little time on a hot summer day. As Granny can testify.

Matilda revelling in the foam

Granny can testify to the enjoyment

The heat, of course, was one of the major aspects of the summer, with global warming seeming to go right on in its inexorable way. That, I’m sure, was one of the things that made the foam so welcome, just like the swimming pool and the sea. And the pleasure the kids took in all three made it all the more bearable for us too.

A fine summer, as I said, despite the heat. The kind that leaves lots of great memories. All of which makes for what we’d call a good time all round, doesn’t it?

A rare moment of peace in an action-packed summer

Grandparenting: 'why?' questions and a strong silent type

After a thirsty outing on their motorbikes
Matilda and Elliott share some refreshment

The ‘why?’ phase is a rich moment in a child’s development, as I rediscovered on my most recent grandparenting escapade.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my father’s lap for a long conversation in which I said little more than “why?”.

“Why don’t planes fall out of the sky, Daddy?”

“Because the air keeps them up there.”

“Why?”

“Because the wing’s shape keeps the pressure below it higher than above it.”

“Why is it higher?”

The conversation went on for ages until eventually my father just laughed and said, “you’ve got really good at ‘why?’ questions, haven’t you?”

If I didn’t answer, “why do you say that?”, I wish I had.

Now it’s Matilda who, at three and a half, has become a dab hand at ‘why?’ questions. That was clear when I took her for a walk in her pram despite her having made it perfectly plain, so plain that no one within half a kilometre’s range could possibly be in any doubt about the matter – she has excellent lungs – that she didn’t want to go.

The Spanish are good at being discreet, but unfortunately the way they were looking away from the grandfather with the wailing child made it so clear they felt discretion necessary, that it did nothing to make me more comfortable. 

“I want my Mummy,” Matilda informed me when she decided to switch from inarticulate wailing to a more articulate variety.

“I’m afraid she’s away.”

“Why?”

“Because she had to go on a trip for work.”

“Why does she have to work?”

“Because if your Mummy and Daddy don’t work, there won’t be enough money for you to have a nice home, enough food and the toys you want.”

“Why?”

I was clearly being driven down the same endless path as I’d once forced my father to take. I tried to change the subject.

“Anyway, we’re having a lovely walk. Look at the colour of the sunset. Look at all the lovely trees.”

“I don’t want a walk.”

I had a flash of inspiration. A rational conversation based on interchanges of ‘why?’ questions and ‘because’ answers wasn’t, it was becoming clear, going to get me anywhere. So I decided this was the time to present her with a simple statement of fact, the kind that allows of no alternative.

“Well, we’re on a walk and that’s all there is to it,” I assured her in what I hoped was a tone of utter finality.

To my astonishment this was greeted with a moment of silence. And a sudden transformation of mood. She sat up and looked at where we were and where we were going.

“Why have you turned around?” she asked. But in a completely different tone, one of interest and, potentially, even pleasure, rather than wailing complaint. She even had the beginnings of a smile.

“Because I thought it would be fun to go down to the backstreets to head back home, rather than just go the same way we came out.”

“But this isn’t the way home.”

“It’s a different way. Look, you can see the houses of the village, and your home is behind them.” 

To match deeds to words, I turned the pram around so that she could see the direction I was pointing. To my immense satisfaction she looked, nodded and seemed satisfied. The smile was no longer just a beginning.

The crying had gone on for nearly quarter of an hour. But the walk lasted an hour and for the rest of it, Matilda was charm itself. Smiling, jokey (she’d lower the shade on her blind and then raise it again in a peekaboo game), simply fun. We talked about the wonderful houses we were going past, the fine trees, the herd of sheep. No subject was too trivial or too complex. And there was no lack of subjects.

Matilda playing with the shade on her pram

It was an immensely satisfying experience. And deeply instructive. It taught me something I already knew about adults. Reasoning may get you nowhere, but a truth that can’t be changed is likely to gain acceptance, or at least resignation. Once resigned, a person is much more amenable to moving on and finding different pleasures, to replace the ones they were previously so upset about missing.

It seems the same applies to kids.

And what about Elliott? 

He too is making fine linguistic progress as he approaches his second birthday. One important breakthrough has been his mastery of the word ‘no’ and another his skilful deployment of ‘and me?’.

‘No’ can get awkward. Standing on a pavement with him one day, with only uphill or down as available directions, I found him answering ‘no’ to both questions “shall we go this way?” followed by “shall we go the other way, then?”. That, I suppose logically, left us rather stuck and going nowhere at all for a while. Fortunately, he made up his mind without further consultation and simply started walking in one of the directions while I, as is often the case when walking with him, was reduced to merely following in his wake. 

It was interesting that the final decision was wordless. I think I’m alone in persisting in the belief that he’s a strong silent type, but every now and then he provides me with powerful confirmation of that judgement.

‘And me?’ is proving immensely useful. Matilda gets something desirable. “And me?” says Elliott and, boy, there’s no way I can resist giving him the same.

That proved a problem when I only discovered, after I’d given Matilda the strawberry yoghurt she’d asked for, that it was the last. That led to an outbreak of strong-but-not-silent-type behaviour. Fortunately, some yoghurt mixed with blueberries helped calm the storm. 

Talking about calm, we had an excellent dose of that restful quality when I took him out for a ride on his fine, plastic, foot-powered motorbike. For the first twenty-five minutes he said not a word. But whenever I called out to him with an instruction – “stop there, Elliott”, “let’s go this way”, or “wait for me at the kerb” – he’d turn and look at me with wide eyes (and he's really good at opening his eyes wide) before quietly doing as I asked without a word of complaint.

Elliott: a daredevil but disciplined biker

Even for the last five minutes, when he started talking again, it was sounds of satisfaction and the occasional ‘OK’, the positive alternative to the ‘No’ he has already mastered so entirely. Overall, it was pleasantly easy to be out with him and unexpectedly quiet. 

Strong, silent type, you see.

Now he just has to learn to stop throwing his plate, strongly and silently, on the floor after he’s eaten as much of its contents as he wants. Because I’m tired of clearing it up. Something I do strongly but, I can assure you, not at all silently.

Oh, and there’s one more instance of his linguistic mastery which is worth recording, though it may be apocryphal. Apparently, the night his mother Sheena returned from a business trip – helping his dad, Nicky, while she was away was my main reason for being there – he told her twice, as soon as he was happily ensconced next to her in bed (an exceptional privilege these days that he’s learned to sleep in his own cot), “Mummy, don’t do that”.

Or at least that’s what she thought he said. She now wonders whether it’s a false memory because he hasn’t said it since. But I think this happens with kids: they come out with something once and then not again for ages, but not because they can’t, only because there’s no need while the same circumstances don’t arise.

After all, here was a strong silent type snuggling down comfortably next to his mum. Now he just wants to get to sleep. How irritating if she makes a fuss of him and keeps him awake. What would you expect him to say, other than “Mummy, don’t do that”? But why would he say it again later?

OK, so the concrete slope was built to skate down
But, hey, what’s to stop daredevils using it as a slide?

Bad language

One factor that militates against my hopes for harmony, rather than conflict, among nations, is the way one group will insult another, which flings the same insults back at the first. 

Exploring this exciting subject is one of the great benefits of learning languages.

When I was studying Italian at college, I was told about a fellow student who’d just completed a PhD thesis about a region in the Italian Alps. Two valleys ran together at a small market town, the only point where the inhabitants of two villages, one up each valley, would meet when they came to sell their produce. At all other times, a spur of the mountains kept them firmly and practically insurmountably separated, even though they were only a couple of kilometres apart as the crow flies. 

If a crow could be persuaded to fly over that mountain.

He found that each spoke its own version of Italian. For instance, the modern definite article in Italian comes from the Latin for ‘that’, ‘illum’ in the masculine (OK, OK, I know that’s the accusative of ‘ille’, but the accusative is the root of the modern forms). Each syllable of the word has given an alternative form of the masculine definite article, ‘il’ and ‘lo’. In one of the villages, the ‘il’ form was used, in the other the ‘lo’.

What’s more, he also found that each village had a way of describing someone as completely mad, or possibly stupid, or even both. And, inevitably, that way was to say that they were like somebody from the other village.

While I was studying French, I was amused to discover that the French referred to what most countries now simply call condoms as ‘capotes anglaises’, ‘English overcoats’. The English, on the other hand, called them ‘French letters’. They are, or at least were, somehow disreputable, so each of the two countries liked to present them as foreign in their origins and, why not, place those origins in the other. 

Many years later, I did some research into one particular Frenchman, a scientist by the name of Maupertuis. I read a colossal number of his letters. I learned to recognise his handwriting without having to read his signature, and that was an extraordinary feeling: I felt I knew him with some intimacy even though he’d been dead for over 200 years.

As I was ploughing through those letters, I came across two that struck me as odd. He’d written them to a fellow scientist in England, a leading member of the Royal Society. “Thank you for the gift”, Maupertuis wrote. “I gave half to le Président Hénault,” a friend of his, “although I have far more need of them than he does.” And, he explained, that it was galling to have to turn to foreigners for the means to “protect our honour from the perils to which our beautiful women expose us”.

Suddenly I realised why it was the English called condoms French letters: it was because the French wrote letters to ask for them, and the English used letters to send them. Contraception was illegal throughout Christian Europe, but  Protestant countries were more inclined than Catholic ones to turn a blind eye to its use. Another researcher had looked into baptismal records from the Protestant Swiss canton of Geneva, and found that you could see families in which there would be a child, and a year or two later a second, and a year or two after that a third, and then no more. Clearly, some kind of family planning was taking place and I doubt very much that in many cases it was abstinence.

And ‘English overcoats’? It seems a good name for protectives “of our honour” that arrive from England. Not a bad euphemism at all.

All this came to mind the other day when I wandered into a bakery in the little town of Hoyo de Manzanares in the hills above Madrid, where I’m spending a few days helping to look after two of my grandchildren (more of that in another post). I hadn’t seen the baker for some time and asked her how she was doing, and in particular how things had worked out with the assistant I’d seen working there in the autumn.

“Se despidió a la francesa,” she told me. 

That literally means “he took French leave”. It’s the expression for leaving sneakily without any kind of farewell. “As soon as the meeting was over, I took French leave,” means that I got out after the discussion ended without saying goodbye to anyone.

Interestingly, the French equivalent is “filer à l’anglaise”. Literally that’s “rushing off in the English way”. Another fine example of different nations attributing something negative, in this instance bad manners, to others.

Despedirse a la francesa
Filer à l'anglaise
or... to take French leave 

Still, at least in this case the English can count on the support of the Spanish. It seems the French are outvoted two-to-one. A much-needed victory for the English in today’s Brexit times.

All the more so after the French recently came over and delivered an all-time record-breaking defeat, 53-10, to England’s rugby team at its headquarters and high temple, Twickenham.

Still. I’m a keen fan of harmony among nations. So there’s no way you’ll catch me saying that this was typical French callousness towards an opponent already down on its luck.

I’ll just say that we got royally screwed, if you’ll excuse my French.

Coronavirus: the Immortals have spoken

Académie Française
Preserving a legacy. If necessary, in aspic

“Don’t put your elbows on the table.”

“Don’t chew with your mouth open.”

“Use the right spoon.”

Ah, the making of the middle class. All those rules. All those do’s and don’ts.

With rather more don’ts than do’s, of course.

And in language too. Never start a sentence, let alone a paragraph, with a conjunction. Never split an infinitive, a stricture I’m trying hard to learn to finally stop being ruled by. Oh, and never end sentences with prepositions, of course.

I’ve recently been listening to an American linguist, John McWhorter. He points out how little sense many of these rules make and how they vanish in time anyway.

For instance, in German today, ‘there’ isn’t the same in ‘stay there’ (‘bleib dort’) and ‘go there’ (‘geh dorthin’). That distinction, between ‘dort’ and ‘dorthin’, used to exist in English too, between ‘there’ and ‘thither’.

“I want to go there,” infant tells mother.

“Now, my dear,” replies mother, “you know that should be ‘go thither’.”

Yes, well, it wouldn’t happen now, would it? But I bet late Renaissance parents would have said something like that, as they tried to make their kids speak English proper, like.

Why do these things vanish? Chiefly, McWhorter claims, when many people start learning the language as adults. Up to the age of twelve or fourteen, children have a capacity to master a language with all its weird peculiarities; beyond that age, they lose it. Imagine foreigners arriving in England and having to learn the language. Viking invaders, say, who settled, ‘married’ local women (the quotation marks are because such arrangements weren’t always consensual) and realised they had to speak English if they wanted to communicate with their kids or most of the people around them.

“Runnest? Runneth? You expect me to learn to say that? Screw that for a game of soldiers. If you insist I’ll add an ‘s’ in the third person singular, though beats me why I bother, but all the rest will just be ‘run’. OK, pal? Happy with that? If not, just remember which one of us came in awe-inspiring boats sweeping across the North Sea, with a bunch of the most fearsome warriors of the Middle Ages. With fire and sword to make it clear to you that we were staying. Come to think of it, I’ve still got the old battle axe somewhere. Should I fetch it? Ah, now you see the sense in the way I conjugate verbs. Good man. Sensible fellow.”

A good basis for protecting middle-class values: use the right spoon

And in German, the basis for a little gender conflict too

One of the niceties of language that vanished from English over those centuries was grammatical gender. As McWhorter points out, it’s somewhat laughable that German treats spoons as masculine, knives as neutral and forks as feminine. I challenge any German to provide a logical reason for the distinction. What, items of cutlery might have gender clashes?

English has done away with all but biological gender. Houses, truth, postboxes, knives, forks and spoons are all genderless. One less useless thing to learn…

But Old English, as a good Germanic language, did have grammatical gender. I’m sure rigid grammarians tried to get speakers of the language to remember the gender of lots of nouns for genderless things. The Vikings, speakers of Old Norse which had its own somewhat different genders, basically couldn’t be bothered to learn a new system and discarded it.

All this to show that languages change. The rigid rules are senseless. Eventually, they go.

But in French, they don’t go easily. A valiant rearguard action will always be put up to prevent their loss. And there’s a prestigious national institution to lead the fight.

It’s called the Académie Française. It was founded by the Cardinal Richelieu who gave the Three Musketeers such a bad time. Its forty members are so important they’re referred to as the ‘Immortals’. My father liked to quote a film I’ve never been able to track down, in which a character is elected to the Academy and, gazing at his reflection in his new uniform, declares “me voilà donc immortel jusqu’à la fin de mes jours” – “so here I am, immortal until the end of my days”.

The Academy issues regular decrees on the French language to ensure that it isn’t allowed to decline into ignominious pauperisation or, as the rest of like to say, change. If it means mummifying the language or preserving it in aspic, then they’re the ones to do it.

Years ago, they announced the verb for to land, ‘atterrir’, literally to come to earth, could be used for the moon too, so you didn’t have to say ‘alunir’, to come to the moon.

Though you could.

Similarly, an ‘Alpiniste’ could go climbing in mountain ranges other than the Alps. You weren’t an ‘Himalayiste’ or ‘Caucasiniste’ depending on which mountains you tackled.

The Immortals have issued a decree on the Coronavirus related disease. It is permissible to refer to it as ‘Covid’, even in French. But it’s important to understand the word’s feminine. Apparently, too many French people have been treating it as masculine, as with most loan words from English. Think of those quintessentially French terms such as ‘le parking’, ‘le brownie’ or ‘le weekend’, where the form ‘le’ for ‘the’ is masculine.

So why is Covid feminine? Because the gender of a compound term, and Covid is a compound of ‘Corona’, ‘Virus’ and ‘Disease’, takes its gender from the principal component. And that principal term, according to the 7 May issue of the Academy’s ‘Dire, ne pas dire’ (‘Say, don’t say’) collection, is the word ‘disease’. Disease in French is ‘la maladie’, where ‘la’ is feminine. 

So the whole term must also be feminine.

La Covid, then, not le. The Immortals have pronounced.

Vive la France, I say. Vive le français too, come to that. But I’m so relieved those Vikings decided they couldn’t be bothered to learn Old English grammatical gender.

The great question of unquestioning animals

Had an interesting conversation with my son David (no, that’s a complete coincidence: we didn’t meet until he was nine and I was 28, by which time we’d both been called David for nine and 28 years respectively) (yes, yes, he’s my stepson really, but the distinction’s not really worth making: I got to do the important part of his rearing, like teaching him to do the washing up, and he learned really crucial things from me, like doing the washing up is a lot less painful than the consequences of not doing it).

Is that all clear now? Can I get on with the story?

Anyway, it’s been a while since either of us was either nine or 28. In fact, it’s about 38 years. And for a long time now, he’s been teaching me at least as much as I’ve taught him. Fortunately, he’s tended to focus on subjects of more interest and less tedium than washing up.

The latest concerned animals learning language. He’d recently heard a podcast on the subject, from The Infinite Monkey Cage.

David. One of the philosophers
I'm privileged to have as sons

We’ve taught certain animals quite a lot of language. I remember reading some years ago about a Chimpanzee who’d mastered 800 words. Not using voice, of course, but sign language. It had learned words such as ‘ice’ and ‘box’ and had revealed a creative streak when it combined them into ‘icebox’ for refrigerator; ‘water’ and ‘bird’ it combined into a single word for a duck. Pretty smart stuff, don’t you agree? OK, sonnets will have to wait for a while, but still not bad, I reckon.

“Ah,” David told me, “but what the podcast was telling me was that the animals never learned to ask questions.”

Now, that had me fascinated. Is that really what separates humanity from other animals. Is it our capacity to think in terms of “what?” or “when?” or even more important “why?” To say nothing of “what the hell?”

We’re always questioning things, aren’t we? As Edward Fitzgerald put it, in his original masterpiece that he insisted was nothing but a “translation” of Omar Khayyam’s Rubayiat:

Into this Universe, and why not knowing, 
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

We’re constantly concerned about where we came from, and where we’re going to, and why. Other animals sensibly focus on whether they’re comfortable now, in which case they enjoy it, or not, in which case they go somewhere else. And where they’re going to find food. Or possibly sex. But without asking “why?”

Still. At least David and I had some fun trying to imagine the kind of questions other animals might ask us if they ever asked any at all.

Such as:

“What makes you think learning to speak is such a big deal anyway?”

Or

“Why the hell do you want to train me to ask questions? Do you think you’re likely to have any satisfactory answers?”

Though the one we preferred was:

“Is there any way I can ask you without offence to just fuck off, leave me alone, and let me get back to the peace I was enjoying before you came along and disturbed my tranquillity with all this nonsense about speech and questions?”

Sorry about the bad language. I can’t help feeling it probably best expresses the way other animals would think about our obsession with teaching them things.

If they ever bothered to think about it at all, that is.

The words to say it. Though they sometimes don't

Today I had some grapes that, unlike most of those sold these days, weren’t seedless. I wondered what to call them. Seeded? Hardly. Seedful? I’m not sure there’s such a word. Or ought to be. Seedy? Seems unfair. They were rather good.

Words aren’t always there when you need them. Expressions, too, can be slippery. The elephant in the room? Who has rooms that big? 

OK, some people do have rooms big enough~
but most of them, I suspect, are short of pachyderms

I always love “at the end of the day”. The one thing you can be sure of at the end of the day is that it gets dark. And don’t you admire people who say “if I’m completely honest”? Does that mean anything they tell you without that preface isn’t to be believed?

I once worked with colleagues who used to tell me, when they wanted a report or some other material written, “it doesn’t have to be War and Peace.”

Just as well. I’m not sure if I could bring the Battle of Borodino to life like Tolstoy. And in any case I suspect most of my colleagues would have found one of the films or TV series far more up their street than any War and Peace presentation I could have produced.

Then there’s an expression I use a lot. It helps me get started on jobs that are going to take a long time, and any job that’s tedious is long. I say, sometimes to myself, “I’ll just break the back of it.”

Gratuitously cruel, isn’t it? I mean, breaking a back? It’s a horrible thought.

But just think if the job’s particularly hard. If it’s back-breaking, say. Then I’d be breaking the back of a job’s that’s breaking mine. Where does that get any of us? You remember Gandhi? “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” Breaking the back of the back breaking only leaves more of us crippled.

Like I said. Slippery things, words. And expressions.

The salesman's 'yeah': businesspeak scales new heights

Far too little attention has been paid to businesspeak, a language second to none in subtlety and indirection, leaving it with enough levels of meaning to make it the lasagne of international linguistics.

No doubt you all know, ‘this is urgent. We need action immediately’ which translates as ‘I’m calling a meeting for the middle of next week. No, damn it. The week after when George gets back from leave.’

You may be less familiar with ‘that’s not a suggestion we can take up at once, but don’t let’s lose sight of it, it’s a really good idea,’ which means ‘I can’t believe you came up with anything that dumb, but HR has told me I have to be encouraging towards the little people, so I’m letting you down gently.’

One of my personal favourite is, ‘I’ve glanced at the document but I haven’t had time to read it in detail,’ which means ‘I know you’ve sent me something but I suspect it’s more than two paragraphs long, so I can’t be bothered to plough through it. Why don’t you take up the first half of the meeting telling me what it contains, while I interrupt with irrelevant questions?’

However, as you’re certainly aware, it isn’t always the most complex creations of humanity that are the most striking. Sometimes it’s pure simplicity that wins the prize. That’s why I’m particularly pleased to be able to present to the world my most recent study of businesspeak, and one of its most phenomenal of structures. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s powerful precisely for its brevity.

I’ve come to call it ‘the salesman’s yeah’. Yes. A single word. And it’s definitely ‘yeah’, not ‘yes’. Here’s how it’s deployed.

‘Did you set up the meeting with Mr Howard?’ asks the worried executive.

‘Yeah,’ replies the salesman, and pauses just long enough to ensure that everyone has fully absorbed the fact that he’s given a positive response.

‘I spoke to his assistant last week,’ he goes on, ‘and she says she’ll make sure he gets my message just as soon as he’s back from his conference in Singapore.’

The master businessspeaker
Masterly. Confidence-inspiring.  Charming

Or then again we have:

‘Have they signed the agreement?’

‘Yeah.’ Pause. The pause is key. ‘Galactica from Legal thought a distributor agreement would be more suitable, so she’s drafting one.’

And a final example.

‘So will we get the order this month?’

‘Yeah.’ Pause. ‘There’s every chance they’ll give us the nod in the next fortnight, ready for the final meeting to authorise the order in six weeks.’

See how it works? If you or I had to communicate the message in the long sentence following the ‘yeah’, we’d probably be inclined to start with a ‘no’. But that’s because we’re naive speakers of that tediously transparent language, everyday English. The really proficient businesspeaker who has mastered the ‘salesman’s yeah’, knows how to give bad news a positive spin. Far better, his ‘yeah’ makes you feel good, and you cling on to that feeling while he gives you the less satisfactory information that follows. So it's outstandingly effective: he manages to communicate a misleading message without telling a lie.

Brilliant.

How can one avoid admiring such talented and ingenious use of words? It takes them out of the realm of the banal, ordinary communication of information in which most of us indulge. It takes us to new heights of communication and miscommunication, rarely seen outside the world of conservative politics.

The words that exalt the private sector

It is a truth not so much universally acknowledged as monotonously repeated, that they order things better in the private sector.

It was a case forcefully put in the recent US elections, where many Romney supporters argued that a tried and tested private sector executive was just what was needed for the most powerful public sector post on earth. 

Not forcefully enough, as it happens, but that wasn’t for want of trying.

Mitt teaching a less which, fortunately, not too many learned

Nothing supports a claim to competence better than evidence of clarity of thought, and nothing proves clarity of thought so much as precision in expression. It is therefore with the sense of fulfilling a public duty that I put before you today some linguistic gems that I’ve been collecting from senior private sector executives in recent months.

Marvel at this small selection of words and sayings:

Antidotal: ‘I only have antidotal evidence for this.’ Some day I hope to hear this said in connection with behaviour described as poisonous.

Harbour: ‘I don’t want to harbour the point.’ Presumably because to do so might lead to our being wrecked at the labour’s mouth.

Plassate: this is a useful word describing the process of calming someone, perhaps a client complaining about poor service. ‘We should do what we can to plassate him.’ Though not, of course, if we have to push the shop out too far.

Amiable: used of someone who has no objection to a course of action. ‘I told him our suggestions and he seemed perfectly amiable to them.’

Catharsis: occurs when an obstacle leads to a momentary halt in progress. ‘They were moving ahead quite quickly, but they seem to have hit a bit of a catharsis.’

It turns out that certain fears tend to justify themselves if you spend too much time worrying about them: they become, in effect, ‘self-proclaiming’.

Sometimes a message can be hopelessly distorted if it passes along a chain of too many people. If trainers train trainers who train users, what they present at the end of the line may bear little relationship to the starting point. This phenomenon, I’ve been assured, is known as ‘Chinese Walls’.

That appeals to me, because it’s a phrase often used by such organisations as the big Consultancies, to explain how they can work with competing companies without a conflict of interest. We might say, in the spirit of this post, hunting with the hare while running with the haddock. Call me a cynic, but I’ve always suspected that things can’t be kept that separate and there are Chinese whispers through the Chinese walls.

And finally, of course, we have the old chestnut: ‘I don’t like the message Peter put out because it inferred that we were doing something wrong.’ Just like this post might be taken to imply that certain managers couldn’t tell a bark from a bite.

Not all of senior businessmen mangle language like this, of course. Many are as limpid in speech as they’re far-sighted in vision. I wouldn’t want to tar them all with the same pencil: that would be like tossing out the baby with the ball court.