IABC Media Relations Commons

Is this English? How can we retool ourselves in dealing with international media?

By Bish Mukherjee ABC

Do you know any of the following words that are found in the dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster, Oxford, Cambridge Encyclopedia and others?

Adda: innocuous meeting with friends where you let your hair down, informal conversation; now used in media to mean hiding places for terrorists as in police weeds out suspected criminals from their addas

Bhagwan: God, the Lord; media use relates also to self-proclaimed gods like Bhagwan Rajneesh and other transcendental meditation gurus
Bhakti: faith, respect, worship
Bhajan: devotional song traditionally sung in the temples but today it is big business and they even have Bhajan concerts; Bhajan albums are big commercial propositions

Badmash: naughty as in criminal naughty
Chota: small, tiny; media usage is often linked to criminals like Chota Rajan, Chota Shakeel and the like
Dharma: religion; as in dharma yudh, that is, religious war
Dharna: Demonstration as in a strike or protest
Dhoti: cloth draped around the waist and legs popularized by Mahatma Gandhi

Garam Masala: hot spices either whole or in powder or paste form comprising of cardamom, cinnamon, cloves etc; media uses it to describe a hot and emerging scene; made famous by the recent Bollywood movie that portrays a hotchpotch of bungled relationships between leading actors and actresses

Izzat: honour or dignity often meaning virginity in women and used in the media in the context of rape, for instance “looting” of Tina’s izzat
Shabash: Well done, an appreciative pat on the back for a job done to requirement, used extensively by ethnic media
Tamasha: a show as in a circus or street rope trick accompanied with singing and dancing; media uses it to describe a chaotic scene

Until ten years ago, USA had the most number of people speaking English. Today India is the world’s largest English speaking nation. With a population of 1.3 billion, India has more people who speak the so-called dynamic variety of English than any country in the world.

Why dynamic? It is because Indian English is very graphic and communicative and this helps in quick visualization and comprehension. The phenomenal growth has been dictated by the astounding growth of the information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) industries. India’s BPO market is US$1 trillion plus. The Oxford dictionary itself has more than 700 Indian words that many media managers have either never heard of or don’t know the derivative meaning or media usage of.

Indian English is already been seen as a linguistic superpower. The sooner we accept it and adapt to the media usage of some of these brand new impactful words the better it will be for communicators. Do we have some catching up to do? You bet.

In a worldwide survey conducted by the United Nations the question asked was: “Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?”

The survey was a failure because of the “wrong” words used in the survey question. Or were they wrong? You be the judge.
 In Europe they didn’t know what “shortage” meant.
 In most of Africa they didn’t know what “food” meant.
 In India they didn’t know what “honest” meant.
 In China they didn’t know what “opinion” meant.
 In the Middle East they didn’t know what “solution” meant.
 In South America they didn’t know what “please” meant.
 In the USA they didn’t know what “the rest of the world” meant.

This write-up published in the Deccan Chronicle newspaper got me thinking.

When we talk of media releases and media conferences not getting us the desired results, how much of it can we attribute to “wrong” words used in the media releases and media conferences?

Sometimes, ironically, the reverse is the result. If President Bush inadvertently uses words that he didn’t intend saying, it still makes big news. Here are examples of some of his media mentions in the past couple of years:

In Washington DC on January 14:
I’m also mindful that man should never try to put words in God’s mouth. I mean, we should never ascribe natural disasters or anything else to God. We are in no way, shape, or form, or form should be a human being, play God.

In Washington DC on March 16:
I’m occasionally reading, I want you to know, in the second term.

In Washington DC on April 28:
It’s in our country’s interests to find those who do harm to us and get them out of harm’s way.

On December 12, defending Dick Cheney’s pre-war assertion that the United States would be welcomed in Iraq as liberators, President Bush said at the NBC Nightly News interview: “I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome.”

Not so long ago, an Asian journalist queried if David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien realize that when they speak to American audiences in the US they are in fact speaking to millions of viewers across the globe and the non-US viewers might have problems understanding the context in which the jokes are being made.

David Letterman once said:
President Bush is vacationing in Crawford, Texas. He will be vacationing for five weeks. That’s a long time. I don’t think he has an exit strategy for his vacation either.

Probably he didn’t, at least as per Jay Leno, who commented in his show: President Bush had an embarrassing moment after holding a press conference in China, did you see this on the news? He tried to leave the room, but the doors were locked. Once again, no exit strategy.

But it is Conan O’Brien who takes the cake on exit strategies. In his show Conan O’Brien remarked: For the first time ever, Republicans in Congress – Republicans! – are demanding to know the President’s exit strategy from Iraq. Yeah, in response the President said “I have an exit strategy, I leave office in 2008.”

“These busted boomers,” writes Constance Lavendar, “are clinging to an argument based on authority, hierarchy, and privilege; they despise digital democracy because it threatens their existence, challenges their authority, and breaks down their well-preserved hierarchy.”

She was commenting on a post in the Chronicle, about The Cult of the Amateur, a book by Andrew Keen about how “experts” are more valuable than the chattering masses, and the internet is killing culture. You could tell she is incensed. I felt I had heard this kind of ‘busted boomer’ argument before.

It emerged from Maurice Saatchi in his column in The Financial Timesin May. (Maurice Saatchi, as you may recall was the legendary co-founder of Saatchi and Saatchi, the ad agency that launched Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in Britain in the late seventies.) The core of (Lord) Maurice’s argument in “Google Data Vs Human Nature” is in these two sentences:

“It is an inconvenient and stubborn fact that outside Newton’s universe, where physical laws govern reality, the world is conditioned by perception.”

He goes on to say:
“People do not know what they want until a brilliant person shows them.”

In his line of reasoning, perception works because people are stupid, and need to be told all the time! That’s very inspiring, isn’t it, in this day and age?

The so-called ‘brilliant people in agencies didn’t come up with the stunning creative work such as Diet Coke/Mentos uncommercial, or the user-generated content that people are riveted to on niche sites. The old guard still wishes that the work of these ’stupid’ people and ‘amateurs’ –on Wikipedia, on blogs, on YouTube– did not exist.

In a later column, Mr. Saatchi wrote: “Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising.” You know he is troubled by this algorithm thing. It must be tough watching the digital natives over-run the place.