Evidently, Siobhan Thompson is back, and BBC’s Anglophenia must be doing a series on the difference between British English and American English. Here’s another gem on British colloquialisms–some you may have heard before, and some that, well, my British friends will have heard more often than we Yanks….
As I find more, I will continue to post these! I find these fascinating!
If you have suggestions for articles or videos you’ve seen for other versions of English for comparison as well, email me and let me know so we can share with everyone! For example, I’d love to see a video comparing Canadian English and American English, or even Canadian English and British English. Or Australian English, Indian English, or South African English, for that matter. 🙂
It seems these kinds of articles are coming out nonstop these days. While this one doesn’t have a video (awwwww), it’s short and to the point, and is another example of why spoken English can be rather confusing. We have pronunciation confusion here in the States with certain towns and such, some due to the same issue mentioned in this article from the names of towns that we took from Mother England, but also incorporating other languages like Native American, Spanish, and French just to name a few.
As a follow-up to my fun post, “No Wonder (Verbal) English is confusing!“, here’s a follow-up that really shows how crazy it can get. Although I think in the end, there is some (okay, a lot of) Celtic actually thrown in there rather than simply English spoken with a Scottish brogue, it proves that even in the United Kingdom–other than Wales who definitely have their own language with Welsh–that English is NOT the same everywhere. Here to prove that is Karen Gillam, who played Amy Pond on Doctor Who.
I’ve been seeing a lot of videos about various accents in the English language lately, and it makes me think that I must have missed some sort of calling to be a linguist. I find it all fascinating! But in watching these two videos about how to do an American accent (from a British perspective) and hearing several UK dialects (that all sound like music to this set of American ears), it’s no wonder that between various vocabularies and actual different sounds in pronunciation that things can get confusing when trying to figure out a way to create a “standardized English”. (And this isn’t even including other dialects around the world!)
Take a listen here– Enjoy! (I’ll be working on some of my British accents. I think I have the Northern Irish/Southern Irish one down, kind of, due to mimicking family relations. 😉 )
An ENIGMA coding machine, found at the Computer History Museum (photo credit: TechCommGeekMom)
Technical communicators truly do have skills that most others don’t have, and it’s a simple set of skills. We take for granted that we can display writing and documentation clearly.
What brought this to my attention most recently–as if I didn’t know this fact already–was dealing with emails from work. I was trying to interpret emails from several educated, fairly influential people from the company, and I didn’t have the faintest idea what they wanted because of unclear directions. Granted, it didn’t help that the email system that we are forced to use at the moment (Lotus Notes) is not exactly user-friendly when it comes to formatting content within an email. Even when I could wade through the quagmire of formatting fogginess, what was being requested of me was not completely clear, and I had to send emails back clarifying the requests.
Although we are often required to work on reducing the number of words used to relay our messages and act as translators of content, it shouldn’t be at the cost of miscommunication. Sometimes having more is less, because more detailed directions can provide less back-and-forth of emails, thus more efficiency in getting the work or task done. From a customer perspective, having accurate documentation–even if it’s long–can reduce call centers help requests significantly.
A great example of making sure that content–whether it’s an email or any other documentation–is efficient is when I worked at the Princeton University Press. The CMS I had to use was an in-house Frankenstein monster of an application, but it worked for better or worse. There was no printed documentation, so when I first started working for the company, I took lots of detailed notes to make sure I understood how to do tasks on the system. I left the company after a few months, but left my notes for my successor. About two years later, my successor left, and my former manager asked me back to fill in temporarily, since she knew my contract had ended, and my ramp-up time wouldn’t be the same as if a new person was coming in during the pinch of getting the new fall catalog posted online. Sure enough, the two-year-old notes were still at the desk, and I could still follow them clearly. (This was when I knew that techcomm was truly my calling!) This reduced the number of times I had to ask my manager to refresh my memory on how to do certain tasks. As a result, the fall catalog information went up quickly, and everyone was happy. Mind you, the documentation I had was pages and pages long–all handwritten, no less, but it was accurate enough that I didn’t need much help in re-learning the system. My second successor was able to use these notes as well, since they were so accurate.
As I said, we take for granted that we have the ability to write cogently and clearly since we all do it on a regular basis. It’d be nice if more people can get the basics of this skill down so that we technical communicators can do our jobs more efficiently. The fact that we can decipher and clarify messages better than anyone should put us in the same ranks of ENIGMA coders, in my mind!
TechCommGeekMom 
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