Make Your Point: using words wisely

We’ve just been to Indonesia. In Jakarta we conducted training for both native English and Indonesian speakers. In Bandung I went to a conference conducted in English, despite most of the 600 attendees being Indonesian vocational teachers. They need to speak and write in English, which will be the language of the ASEAN community when it comes into effect at the end of 2015.

As English becomes a lingua franca, it’s going to be worth taking the time in workplaces around the globe to consider how everyone uses the language. You might even want to check out this idea of conducting a tutorial on English as a lingua franca (yes, it’s got an acronym, ELF), developed a few years ago by a team attached to York St John University in England.

Diplomacy relies heavily on finding the right words. We advise our clients to be very careful with colloquialisms. You just can’t be sure your interlocutors will realise you want them to get to the point if you tell them ‘don’t come the raw prawn with me’. It looks like Pravda got the gist of what Tony Abbott meant by shirt-fronting the Russian President, referring to the PM’s former life as a pugilist. But what about Australians? Not being a football fan, I didn’t really know what the PM intended to do until I read this explanation of the variations in meaning between AFL and rugby. Thank goodness, Abbott’s code (rugby) is, in this instance, slightly more genteel. Overall, though, I hope he’s decided to eat his words.