Did you understand what I said?

Oh, the woes of my life. I am confronted with daily annoyances in the form of bad English. It isn't hard. Really it's not. At school we get taught how to pronounce our letters, how to write legibly, how to answer a question, and how to have an intelligent conversation. It seems though that for many, these basic skills are not reinforced or encouraged and they quickly forget. Pretty much the moment they step beyond the confines of the educational establishment.

Many statistics are thrown around about the cost of poor or lack of training given to staff, whether or not the education system in the UK is equipping our graduates with the necessary skills needed to be successful, the literacy levels of 11 year olds compared to 15 years ago. I'm doing a search at the moment to identify the cost of poor English skills for businesses. Now I'm not referring to non-native English speakers, I'm talking about all those millions of people born and raised in the UK who have no sodding excuse but to understand and converse in their own bloody language.

Not found a stat yet.

So what's happened that has fuelled these fires that rage deep within my soul? I pose a trail of thought to a colleague. Dear Bob, I've been listening to a webinar about X topic and had a thought that as a business we should have a plan for attending and promoting similar things. This is by no means urgent and maybe something we can talk about later. Bob - I'll try and get in touch.

What? Did you even read my fucking message your sodding moron? Are you incapable of comprehending the very words that are in front of your face? Or is this your way of telling me in the vaguest possible way that this is an area of interest and that indeed we should do such things and the suggestion was positive and productive? Or are you just a twat face?

Much like the response to the question - do you want tea or coffee? Yes. AAARGH.

English is not rocket science. You do not have to understand if variable X impacts component Y while re-calibrating path Z. I deliver a message, you receive message, you respond to message, and the cycle continues. Psychologically speaking, this is how we understand communication at its basic level.

So what does it cost a business for native English users? Time spent venting frustrations on a blog when I could be doing far more interesting things like developing training courses. And telling others about it later. A lot of wasted energy and effort to humiliate Bob. Bob can really piss me off at times. And this is one of those times.

Still no stat found.

I am super-busy

In a meeting today I heard the term "hyper sensitive" when someone was talking about a process we're developing. I was meant to be listening to the rest of the conversation but then I got side-tracked by the sheer annoyance I was experiencing with this poor English.

Here's the skinny. We have thousands of words in the English language that have very specific definitions. Yet it seems far too many English speaking individuals are too lazy to think of the right word and so say stupid things like "this is really important" or "we have to be seriously confidential about this" or "please make sure you absolutely understand". Good God. We have words to qualify the words which are already meant to be clear. Because we're all numbnuts.

So what can we do about this attack on the English language? I'd have hoped our world-class education system was taking care of this. Clearly it fucking isn't. So it's incumbent on pedants and word-geeks like me to point out such things. Why though? Because people are too seriously busy.

Henceforth I will be a taskmaster and publicly deride bad English. And here's an example of recent ignorance.
Bob: How do you spell rapport?
Me: How do you think?
Bob: R-E-P-O-U-R?
Me: No, R-A-P-P-O-R-T
Bob: Oh, thanks. So it's said "rapporT"? (emphasis on the 'T')
Me: No, it's said "rapport"
Bob: Oh, it's said "rrrapport"?" (rolling the first 'r')
Me: No, it's said "rapport"

This happened. It actually sodding happened. I had a fucking conversation about how to spell and say "rapport". Seriously. Why should I have to have this conversation? How do you work in a professional environment on a daily basis and not know how to speak English?

So, please avoid using totally unnecessary words when they're not really needed. I mean they just seriously add a lot of additional nonsense to a conversation that should by all definition in reality be quite honestly clear.

And if you didn't catch on, that was sarcasm.