Behaviours, sport and American English
Week 12 of Words of the Week, my dictionary of poor language and terminology
Behaviours
The perfectly acceptable plural word behaviour has gained a stray s in the corporate world. Almost everyone now uses it, following like sheep.
Again, there are precedents. In a poem about the decay of civilized values WH Auden wrote, in November 1934, “Looking and loving our behaviours pass/ The stones, the steels and the polished glass”. But Auden was notoriously faddish. Even so, his usage sounds better than Cisco from its 2019 annual report: “For Cisco, Conscious Culture is an inclusive and diverse environment, molded by our beliefs, behaviors, rituals, and principle ”. Rituals? That sounds rather sinister. There is some strange behaviour over at Cisco these days. It may already be too late to prevent the spread of behaviours but, as usual, what seems like an innocuous change of usage conceals a conceptual shift. The singular word behaviour implies that this is what we are like. Our behaviour is all of a piece. The plural behaviours breaks that down into individual actions. The things we do (our behaviours) add up to what we are like (our behaviour).
Sport
Business is not sport and there is a limit to what you can learn about business from the experience of having played rugby for New Zealand. The agenda of business away-days show that many executives are oblivious to the lack of connection. It can be hard to avoid sport on any given day at work. The ball is in their court, it’s all going down to the wire, let’s touch base, the level playing field, a ballpark figure, slam-dunk, heads up, playing hard-ball, ball park, touch base, a game changer, moving the goalposts, pole position and a curveball. Yet try to avoid sporting clichés in your writing. They do not contain much insight, they exclude people who do not know about sport and they have become a dull cliché. So no close of play, no sticky wicket, no game of two halves, no behind the eight ball.
American English
The language written and spoken in America differs in some well-known respects from its usage in England. Much business writing has to work in both places so some conventions on usage and spelling need to be established. The first thought is to avoid the snobbish and unhistorical idea that the English have rightful ownership of a language which the Americans insist upon subverting. This is nonsense. The most partisan advocate of the alternative, that American English teems with the life lost in the flat English variety, is HL Mencken whose 1919 book The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States was an extended plea for the linguistic ingenuity of the Americans. Mencken is making the essential point that languages change, and that usage can be evocative and interesting when it departs from accepted convention.
The wonder is, in fact, that so powerful a nation as America has not had more influence on English than it has. The linguist Max Weinreich once said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The best policy therefore is not to worry too much about what is correct and adopt a clear corporate position on vocabulary and spelling. If you want to see the color of your money in New York but try a different colour in London then there is nothing wrong with that. Many words which we might now regard as quintessentially American – gotten as the past participle of get or fall for autumn – originated in England, were adopted in America and subsequently disappeared in the mother country. Besides, fall is a lovely visual evocation of the season, a much better word than autumn. Fall remained in use in England until the second half of the 19th century and why it fell out of favour then is a mystery.
Plenty of spellings that we now regard as correct – such as magick contracted to magic – came from American usage. Which of these serviceable English words – blizzard, talented, reliable – would you like to do without? They were all imports from America once. Do you never say the words commuter, telephone, radio or currency which are all of American origin? Two countries that trade so freely will always trade words and it is to the benefit of both that they do. Britain has been an open nation, historically and that suits language formation just fine, to adopt a good colloquial American expression.