Can you speak American?

Australian businesspeople operating in American markets know this all too well – they do not speak English in the 50 States. They speak American. And they will ask you if you do too.

This is not just parochialism in action – there is a grain of truth to it. Oscar Wilde knew this when he remarked, “We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language” – and 120 years later, the language of Corporate America presents even more of a communication challenge than you might expect.

The trap for young players is to assume that a lifetime of watching American TV is adequate preparation. It is not.

Sure, you may be comfortable translating ‘economy’ to ‘coach’, ‘lift’ to ‘elevator’ and ‘jumper’ to ‘sweater’. But it’s the first ‘reaching out’ that gets you. To the Australian ear it sounds a little more dramatic than ‘contacting’ someone should really be. This is followed closely by ‘relevancy’ and ‘normalcy’, which one assumes at first to be Bush-style ‘mis-speaks’. ‘Planning ahead’ becomes ‘being planful’, and ‘healthy’ follows suit as ‘healthful’.

If you’re brave enough to speak, you’ll find your reference to meeting ‘fortnightly’ will be met with confused expressions, a rhetorical question like “have we just gone back to mediaeval times?” and some advice to use ‘bi-weekly’ in future.

At all times avoid mentioning your ‘diary’ – no one wants to hear about your personal musings or indeed the prospect of a memoir. Talk about ‘schedules’ and ‘calendars’, and ‘sked’ instead of ‘diarise’.

When you hear that you’ve ‘lucked out’ you can rest assured that you have not missed out but are in fact, counter-intuitively, in luck.

Expect to hear expressions like ‘quarterbacking the project’ (shepherding it every step of the way), ‘hit the cover off the ball / knock the ball out of the park’ (knock them for six), ‘we’ll take care of the blocking and tackling’ (the basics, the everyday stuff), ‘clipping coupons’ (not adding any value), ‘from the get-go’ (from the very beginning) and – my personal favorite – ‘off the reservation’ (off-message, lost the plot).

Invited to go on a boondoggle? That’s a junket. A catywumpus? A mess, a debacle. Circle back? Get back to you. Soup to nuts? End-to-end my friend, because apparently meals start with soup and end with nuts. Somewhere. In America.

When you’re ready to pull your hair out over all this, you can safely express this as ‘going third rail’ – a wonderfully New York City expression that refers to the third rail on subway tracks, which electrocutes on contact.

Of course, I’m sure an American in Australia would find its equivalent, ‘going berko’, just as indecipherable.

Advil*, anyone?
* American Panadol

(Source: Smh)