language

Losing their way in management gobbledegook

Readers who know me personally will know that I am a keen follower of Australian Rules football and the Collingwood Football Club in particular. Tonight my team plays one of our ‘traditional rivals’, Richmond. Unfortunately for the spectacle it’s likely to be a one-sided affair as Collingwood are reigning premiers and Richmond are, well, let’s just [...]

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Fine tune your language for better communication

On a recent trip to Vietnam I found myself sitting in a hotel lobby for a few minutes. With nothing else to do, I eavesdropped on the communication taking place between staff and guests at reception. (Beware the bored writer.) As I listened, small misunderstandings seemed to creep into nearly every conversation I heard across [...]

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I Got it, You Got it, We ALL Got it

I’ve got a bee in my bonnet and of late it has got more and more active. Someone’s got to help! Now I pride myself on not being a pedant on subjects linguistic. Your pronunciation of pronunciation is no concern of mine. I’m as prone as the next person to completely overlook the odd split infinitive. If [...]

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Obama’s Cairo Speech Dissected: The Power of Language

So Barack Obama has made another inspirational speech. This is hardly remarkable: we’ve known for some time that Obama makes George W. look like a performing seal, and an inarticulate one at that. Yet even in this context Obama’s speech in Cairo was remarkable. In less than 6000 words he was able to strip bare [...]

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