scuttlebutt: Today, this means rumors or gossip. It’s derived from the term scuttled butt, a barrel (butt) with a hole in it (scuttle), in which drinking water was stored on a ship. Sailors would gather around the scuttled butt, get a drink, and exchange news.

Flak over Berlin during World War II

flak: We know this to mean opposition or dissent, but the term originated as a German military abbreviation for “airplane defense cannon”: Fliegerabwehrkanone.

ditch: In its verb form, to ditch means to “bail out.” The term supposedly originated among WWII British pilots whose planes were shot down over the English Channel, also known as “the ditch.”

turn a blind eye: This expression stems from British Admiral Lord Nelson, who was blind in one eye. He conveniently ignored a signal from a superior’s ship to cease fire by placing his telescope to his bad eye and saying he didn’t see a thing, thus continuing the battle and ultimately winning it for the British.

A Parthian shot

rule of thumb, parting shot, keep it under your hat: These are all archery terms, referring to the sizing of a longbow, a final shot fired off after Parthian archers on horseback had ridden through an enemy formation, and a place to keep a spare bowstring, respectively.

turncoat: A traitor. Refers to the practice of turning one’s coat inside-out to hide one’s allegiance when changing sides in a battle. A close cousin of showing one’s true colors.

deadline: A firm limit; derived from a literal line drawn inside the prison yard walls, beyond which prisoners would be shot if they attempted escape.

khaki: From the Hindi for “dirt,” this popular color for slacks soon became standard issue for British soldiers in colonial India, whose bright uniforms made them easy targets.

decimate: Derives from a punishment in the Roman legion in which every tenth (deci-) man in a less-than-satisfactory unit would be killed.

taken aback: Meaning surprised or stunned, this is an old sailing term that refers to a sudden change in the wind that leaves the boat directionless until the sails can be adjusted.

For example, some aboriginal Australians don’t use left and right to determine direction—they use north, south, east and west. As a result, they possess an amazing ability to perform complex navigational tasks. Their spatial conceptualization of the world also affects how they perceive and construct other things like morals, values, family relations and time.

Other examples include differences in the way Japanese and Spanish assign agents to actions; speakers are more likely to say “the vase was broken” instead of “John broke the vase.” This affects how speakers of these languages assign blame and feel about guilt. A certain Amazonian tribe refers to quantities in terms of “a few” or “many,” and was found to have trouble determining exact numbers of items. Russian speakers, who have an unusual number of words for variations in shades of blue, were found to have a greater ability to see and differentiate shades of blue than non-speakers.

What does this all mean for business writing? It means that in the Internet age, when communications make their away around the world in multiple languages for an international audience, writers will have an even more difficult time ensuring that their messages and meanings are correctly conveyed. What makes for a wonderfully coherent argument in French may break down entirely when read by a native speaker of Portuguese for whom French is a second language, or when translated into Mandarin.

There’s no doubt that writers, especially those engaged in international business or global communications, will have to take the old mantra “know your audience” to an even deeper level. They’ll have to understand how their audience’s language affects its perception of the written word, and adapt their writing accordingly.

This sounds like a big task, and it is. After all, an American company doing business in the EU can expect to tangle with French, German, Spanish, Italian and dozens of other languages in the course of a day, and the cacophony of foreign tongues grows even louder in Africa and Asia. But it can be done—after all, this is a country that has learned to distinguish varying degrees of quality in take-out sushi, and which restaurants in the area offer the most authentic Pad Thai. Surely, we can learn to be just as subtle with our writing as we are our food.

–Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride”

Writer Suzannah Windsor Freeman posted on her blog in November 2009 several adjectives that have lost all meaning and sense of perspective in modern usage. One of the most common is awesome, which today means “very good,” as in breathtaking, amazing and awe-inspiring. In the past, awesome meant inspiring fear or reverence. Angels were awesome, as were earthquakes, gothic cathedrals, solar eclipses and so on. It’s safe to say that compared to those things, Lady GaGa is not awesome.

Another of Freeman’s example is the word incredible. In modern usage the word also has the connotation of “very good, fantastic, or fabulous” while traditional usage defines it as less-than-credible or lacking credibility. Flying elephants are incredible. Alibis can be incredible. Witnesses or newspaper reports can be incredible. Can brownies be incredible? (I’ve yet to meet a desert I didn’t trust.)

Here are some more:.

• Literally. “I’m literally dying of thirst.” You’re probably not, but you may be doing so figuratively
• Unique. Something is either unique or it isn’t. One singer can’t be more unique than another one. So saying, “Madonna was the most unique singer of the decade” is like saying someone is “a little pregnant.” The same goes for…
• Perfect. It’s either perfect or it’s not, and there’s no such thing as “more perfect.”
• Ironic. This misused word was made famous by Alanis Morisette’s song of the same name which, ironically, contained no irony, just a lot of unfortunate coincidences.  A circumstance is ironic if it is the opposite of what’s expected, not if it’s a bummer. “It was ironic that the ship survived the storm at sea only to sink in the harbor.” (although that’s a bummer, too…)
• Mad. As Chris Rock once said, “Whatever happened to crazy?” If you’re mad, you have poor mental health. You’re not angry, although a temper tantrum may make one look mad.
• Appalled. Appalled shares a root with pallor, which means a white, ghostly complexion. To be appalled is to be so affected by something that it drains the blood from your skin. I don’t think as many of us are as appalled as we think we are.
• Practically. This means the opposite of theoretical, not “almost.” This is correct: “While the military’s new jet plane performed well in computer testing, it was practically useless on the battlefield.” This is incorrect: “I was practically killed on the way home.”

These are just a few examples. Readers, feel free to post more from your own experiences!

William Safire once said, “Avoid clichés like the plague.”

That’s humorous yet sound advice, presuming one knows the definition of clichés. According to Weber State University, they are “old coins of language: phrases that once made a striking impression but have since been rubbed smooth by repeated handling.” There are several types of clichés, which include similes, metaphors, idioms and inflated phrases. Many business professionals consider clichés trite and annoying at the very least, but more often representative of lazy communicators and thinkers.

Business writing has its own special collection of buzzwords that fall into the category of clichés: For example: “synergy,” “win-win,” “scalable enterprise solutions for the desktop,” and “in this troubled economy,” to name just a few. One prominent columnist for Bloomberg News, Caroline Baum, even compiled a list of the six most overused phrases of 2009. Her choices?

1. “new normal”
2. “unprecedented”
3. “exit strategy”
4. “green shoots”
5. “uncertainty”
6. “historic opportunity”

Unfortunately, business writing contains far too many of these phrases, and historic events like the recent recession only provide an excuse to create dozens more. While it’s sometimes difficult to break the habit, it’s important to make the effort. Proof your writing not only for spelling, grammar and content, but for the overuse of clichés as well. I know this is hard to do. Many of us are afraid we’ll seem foolish, ignorant and less than hip if we can’t toss around the latest jargon like a cheap plastic Frisbee at a backyard cookout. Conversely, I propose that using business jargon doesn’t make one appear intelligent and cutting-edge, but rather shallow and lacking in originality and creativity. Rather than denigrate your work, I’ll bet that your readers will thank you for sharp, clear writing—something that is enjoyable and understandable—for a change.

The British Empire

Did you know that English is spoken as an official language in more than 80 countries, territories and dependencies? Moreover, it is spoken unofficially by nearly everyone in at least two others: the United States and Australia? Add in the many countries in which a large portion of the population speaks English, such as France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, and the countries in which English is spoken for business or political purposes, such as China and Japan, and you can’t help but realize the breadth and depth of the English language around the globe.

This is nothing new, and it reflects the impact of hundreds of years of British colonialism and the global impact of post-World War II American economics and culture. What is new, however, is the Internet. Suddenly, the nearly one billion speakers of English around the globe have access to each other’s newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs, Facebook pages—in short, they can truly tap into the global consciousness of English speakers.

The impact of spoken English clearly has tremendous impact for written communication as well, especially for companies doing business in emerging economies. The potential for miscommunication and misunderstandings is greater than ever before. Slights and unintended insults that may never have had legs 15 years ago will now likely travel the globe in minutes.

Consider this small example that materialized as a result of an opinion column written by New York Times columnist George Vecsey on allegations of football recruiting violations committed by the University of Tennessee. In the column, Vecsey poked a little fun at southern culture, with lines like “If you’re ever in the neighborhood, y’all come see us, y’heah?”

In the pre-Internet era, this column may have gone largely unnoticed, even though it was in the New York Times. But in 2009, Vecsey’s column created a minor blowup in the blogosphere, generating this response from east Tennessee journalist Ben Garrett and this follow-up from southwest Virginia journalist Dan Smith, among others. Smith, a career newspaperman and member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame, whose members include Roger Mudd, Ann Compton, and James J. Kilpatrick, called Vecsey “a Yankee newspaperman too lazy to do his homework and too steeped in redneck, inbred stereotypes” and said that Vecsey’s column was “mostly wrong, mostly bigoted, mostly shows his uninformed a** to the rest of the world.”

Yikes. Especially that “rest of the world” part.

The lesson here is for writers: consider the audience. In our electronic age, audiences may be far wider than the primary readership an author intended. A gaffe poking fun at a foreign culture, committed by a careless company spokesperson, could cost millions in lost sales, have a negative impact in vital emerging markets, cause irreparable damage to the company brand, and even generate international political ramifications. Remember, the written word carries a big stick!

The rapid advance of technology has resulted in the addition of many new and interesting words into our vocabulary that weren’t around even a few years ago. My favorites are the nouns that somehow become verbs. Here are a few examples:

E-mail: Remember, this is an abbreviation for the noun electronic mail, which went out with the Clinton administration. And it’s been a verb for a while now: Please e-mail me that picture of you at the beach.

Text: Once a noun that meant a document or book, today it’s what everybody does with cell phones. Tom texted me, but I was in a meeting and couldn’t get to my phone.

Defense: Heard mostly in sports circles, defense has somehow replaced to defend or to defend against. Do we chalk this one up to jocks abusing the English language? Example: The Saints’ explosive offense has proven tough to defense for opposing teams. Honorable mention: Audible, or what happens when the quarterback suddenly and unexpectedly changes the agreed-upon play at the line of scrimmage. Peyton Manning audibled a pass play when he saw the defensive formation.

Google: Once a word known only to mathematicians, googol is 10 the power of 100, or 10¹⁰⁰. (Not to be confused with a googolplex, which is 10^googol.) Then, the Internet search engine (and now advertising conglomerate) Google came along and blew the competition to pieces. Now Google is synonymous with Internet searching in the same way that Kleenex is synonymous with tissue. I asked my math teacher what a googol was, and she said to google it.

Resource: This is a new one to me, but White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs used it the other day when discussing the administration’s plans for Afghanistan. “I will let Secretary Rumsfeld explain … whether he thinks that the effort in Afghanistan was sufficiently resourced during his tenure as secretary of defense,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.

Unfriend: Oxford American Dictionary’s 2009 word of the year, unfriend is Facebook slang for removing someone from your list of Facebook friends. It’s the bastard child of friend, which means to befriend someone on Facebook. Bob unfriended me after I made fun of his golf game.

Torrent: No longer a wall of rushing water, the verb form of torrent means to download something from the Internet using “bit torrent” technology, usually a pirated copy of a song, movie or software. Rather than pay $24.99 for the Harry Potter DVD, I just torrented it to my laptop.

And there are more: to spam, to parent, to photoshop a picture…ad naseum. Why are these words important, you ask? Some of them may seem odd now, but odds are, they’ll become a part of the lexicon and therefore important for anyone in the communication business to know. As the cell-phone texting, unfriending and torrenting millenial generation assumes more and more of a leadership role in business and politics, these terms will become the norm. And as the baby boomers retire, their own cultural dictionary will retire with them.