Me speak English

Langauge as a means to communicate is a good thing, I have theoretically have an advantage. English. The language of commerce even if it favours sidewalks, realizations and honors, rather than pavements, realisations and honours. However language, the English language which offers a multitiude of various nuances of emotion, colour and general dialect, can be a barrier. Business wants and expects an English of plain, simples, get-the-point-across understanding. So words are resticted to a base of recognisable words taught in the national standard text book and chat is slowed to resemble a 'slowmo' version of reality. Towcester is pronounced tow-cest-er in this not-quite-parallel universe.

I once, fool that I am, corected some foreign colleagues intent on pronouncing 'mayor' as 'major', it was pronounced 'mayre', I pontificated from my pulpit of leather-look chair, as their eyes rolled upwards to my holy verbal eliteness. It was instead digging a verbalistic hole. I was right in all tests that academia may wish to embarass me with, but I was so wrong in all other fields of social acceptance.

In my early days I flowered languages with analogies that had people scratching heads, why was Johnny Foreigner talking about dinner at 10 o'clock, as why else would I be talking of taking a "pinch of the salt". I D'oh.

Business English is not the Queen's English, it is a second language, it is not a mother tongue.