English as a Foreign Language

British Library



Sponsored Post

Five years ago, I was happily managing a branch of Ottakar's Bookstores in a sleepy coastal town in southern England. It wasn't the most exciting place to run a bookshop, but I worked with some lovely people and my employers were like-minded people who hated business jargon and viewed my personal quirks as an asset rather than a threat.

A few months later, Ottakar's was bought by HMV, who owned the Waterstone's bookshop chain and, almost overnight, the culture of the business changed.

What alarmed me most of all wasn't the changes in working practices or even the new restrictions on local autonomy, but the use of language. In Ottakar's, anyone who used jargon was ridiculed. In Waterstone's, good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon words like old, new and closing down were replaced with legacy, conversion and exiting. When I had problems with a stock-management system that didn't really work, I was told that I needed to upskill.

I quickly discovered that reflection was a bad thing. We needed to be continually going forward and it wasn't enough to just do things - we had to ensure that we were actioning them. However, if opportunities presented themselves, we were encouraged to take advantage of any easy wins.

If we were presented with a rather challenging spreadsheet full of sales figures, we were encouraged to drill down and identify any issues. If there were issues that were beyond our control, we were encouraged to escalate them to a higher level. On the few occasions that anyone owned up to making a mistake, it was announced that learnings had been made. If I dared to make joke about this in meetings, I realised that I was surrounded by people with no sense of humour. I had to go.

In general, I have found that people use jargon to either obfuscate the truth or make perfectly simple things seem terribly serious and important. Regimes like jargon.

But if we're aware of our language and why it is in a constant state of flux, it is harder for the dictators to insist that their words belong to some long-established immutable truth. This is why I was delighted to accept an invitation from the British Library to do a sponsored post about a new exhibition called "Evolving English".

Evolving English is a free exhibition which is open until April 3rd this year and includes the only surviving manuscript of "Beowulf", the Shakespeare Quartos, Dr Johnson's dictionary and a variety of examples of different uses of English, including early advertising campaigns, text messages, comics, children's recordings, web pages, lists of slang and examples of newspapers from around the world.

There are also some wonderful dialect recordings, which I have already mentioned in this previous post.

If you live too far away to visit the Evolving English exhibition, there are opportunities to join in online. First, there is this quiz, which isn't as easy as I thought. Second, you can participate in the Tweetosphere (you heard it here first) #evolvingenglish.

If you are lucky enough to visit the exhibition, before April 3rd, you can actually become part of the collection by reading an extract from Mr Tickle. This will be kept as part of an archive to demonstrate what accents were like in 2010. I wish that a similar experiment could have been conducted 100 years ago, as I suspect that accents and word usage are in an even greater state of flux than we realise.

I'm delighted that an exhibition like this is taking place, because as long as we are of what's happening to our language, we can stop others from misusing it.

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