Gather round, my readers, and I’ll tell you a little story of corporate missteps and sleazy language usage.

Last summer, in a kingdom far, far away, I was sitting at home with my parents, brainstorming about how to make our family’s business a bit more manageable. We use a cell phone as the main number for the business, which is also a personal line for one of the members of my family. We came upon the idea of trying to find a cellphone that allowed one to have multiple lines, so we could turn off the business phone line at closing, yet still be able to get in touch with the person who answers it on a personal line. This would be a convenient solution for everybody involved, so I set off to try and get information.

At this point, I called our cellphone providers, we’ll call them “Shingular” (or “the New Bay-TT”), to try and get some info on this possibility. After a few minutes on hold, I was connected to a representative (“Bonnie”). After exchanging the vast quantity of personal information needed to confirm that I’m me, our conversation went something like this:

Me: I’d like to get some information on using two phone lines with a single phone, so we can have a business and personal number ring through to the same phone, ideally being able to turn the business line off at a certain point. Do you have any phones or plans that offer that as a feature?
Bonnie: Sure, hold on just a second and I’ll ask somebody
— 5 minutes of holding —
Bonnie: Alright, so you’d like to have a second line added to an existing phone?
Me: Yeah, if it’s possible
Bonnie: Which line?
Me: [I give her the number]
Bonnie: Alright, let me do some research, can I place you on hold?
Me: Sure
— 20 minutes of hold —
Bonnie: Alright, I’ve gone ahead and deactivated the number [our main business number], your new number is 30…
Me: Wait, what?!
Bonnie: You said you wanted to add a new line to the phone at [ the number], so I deactivated the old one
Me: No, no! I wanted to add another line in addition to the first. Can you reverse the change?
Bonnie: Oh. Well, you should’ve said so. I’ll put in a request to change the number back, it’ll be three to five business days…

At this point, the owner of the phone in question walks in to ask why her phone just cut out mid-call, and I’m in shock at the fact that a request for information has resulted in the deactivation of our business line.

I ask for a manager, and find out that yes, it does take them three to five days to reactivate a cell phone that they themselves turned off in around 20 minutes. I ask for a manager’s manager, because, well, we kinda need a business phone, and all they can offer is “We’re sorry to hear that, we’ll listen to the tapes to see if a miscommunication occurred”.

So, I give up. I get a case number, hang up, and glare angrily at their logo for a few minutes hoping for some sort of voodoo reactivation acceleration. Doesn’t work.

I called the next day to see if they had done anything. Still nothing. I called the day after. Nothing. The day after that. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Finally, I called a consumer affairs sort of person at Shingular and explained the whole situation on the fourth day of being without a business phone number. I spent my obligatory 10 minutes on hold, and then it happened. The sleaziest, most rank corporate doublespeak I’ve ever heard. He got back on the line and said “Well, we’ve reviewed the tape. It sounds like our agent did take too much initiative with your request.”

I think I actually started laughing. “Too much initiative”. I hope, for the sake of the man who said it, that that’s a canned line that they train people to use in these situations, because if he came up with that unprompted, I fear for his soul.

Framing: BS by any other name

This particular phrasing is a wonderful example of what prominent linguist George Lakoff calls “framing”. Framing, simply put, is the creative use of wording to change a person’s perception of a given concept, statement, or question. One uses words with a good connotation (associated feeling) to describe what people might consider to be a bad thing, in hopes that they’ll listen to the words, and not the nastiness that lies beneath.

The most common example is the Republican Party’s talking point of “Tax Relief”. They do their best to use this phrase as often as possible, because whenever they do, it helps advance their cause in the mind of the listener, however subtly, due to the wording. In general, we are “relieved” of an unnecessary burden, and “relief” is always a good thing. So, by talking about tax relief, taxes are lumped in with worry, ailments, pain, and discomfort. Although somebody might not want to cut taxes irresponsibly, who wouldn’t want to give people relief?

Our nameless Shingular executive has used framing beautifully here with “to take too much initiative”. Rather than apologizing or explaining that they’ve made an error, he frames Bonnie’s blatant mistake as a good thing. Everybody likes to hear about people “taking the initiative”, setting out to get things done, not just talking. We put it on resumés and job applications, and in our corporate culture, it’s quite a virtue. How on earth could I object to an employee going above and beyond the call of duty and taking too much initiative with my request?

Of course, this same strategy of framing bad things in the guise of excess good could apply elsewhere. We could claim that a man crushed in heavy machinery “recieved an overly passionate hug from the compactor”. We could argue that really, an aerial bombardment is a “free fireworks display for opposing troops at excessively low altitude”.

The problem, of course, is that if people see through your framing (especially when it’s this shameless), you end up seeming like a real sleazeball. For him to use a line like this is bad, but to use it to avoid apologizing is just heinous.

Unfortunately for the Shingular rep, I saw through it. Moments after the “too much initiative” line, I asked to be transferred to his manager. Luckily, she was nice, competent, and willing to help. Five days after the ordeal began, we finally got the line back, and they even threw in a free month for our trouble (this is the only reason I’m not using the company’s real name for google to find).

The morals of this story

This story has two morals:

Shingular/New Bay-TT customers, make sure and specify that you’d like the rep to ask you explicitly before they make any changes to your account. It might not be easy to undo anything.

Service Reps, please give us a little credit, and avoid using framing to try and cover your own mistakes. We’ll see through it, and your well-crafted lines will seem like a wealth of excessively fresh, free, waste-based organic fertilizer from America’s finest Cattle. See, it’s insulting when we use it with you. How do you think we feel?

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Corporate Language, Language Humor, Language Usage, Language and Thought | 1 Comment


Ladies and Gentlemen, I generally try and keep my posts both humorous and informative, but today, I’m afraid I must speak seriously about an up-and-coming issue which has already ransacked the world of American fashion and restaurant decor: Unnecessary French Syndrome.

The Symptoms

You may have experienced this terrible, terrible disease yourself. Have you every walked into a restaurant, only to see trite phrases like “C’est toujours la fête” ['it's always a party'] framed and hung on the walls, with other French words stenciled at 10 foot intervals, ranging from “le rendezvous” to “le vin”? Have you walked down the street, only to see a young lady’s handbag prominently featuring a French phrase meaning ‘the cat is beneath the tea kettle’? If you’ve experienced these gratuitous, nonsensical uses of the French language aimed at creating pretense, then your life has been touched by this awful syndrome.

Generally, the syndrome is caused by the desire of an American business to fictitiously align itself with European Culture (or Couture). Once that desire is in place, some businesses choose to start using snippets of a European language (like French or Italian) in advertisements, menus, locations, or even on their products. These snippets, although incomprehensible to the vast majority of Americans (usually including the proprietor of the business), are presented as a means of gaining status, allying themselves with European Culture and elevating themselves above English speaking America.

The most disturbing aspect of this syndrome is that the French (or Italian) used doesn’t necessarily need to be grammatically correct (or even real). I’ve seen t-shirts that say “J’ai Paris!” (‘I have Paris!’), probably intending “J’aime Paris!” (‘I love Paris’). When I asked the wearers, they weren’t sure what it meant in the first place, confirming my suspicion that, really, it doesn’t matter what it says, so long as it looks French.
Another beautiful example of made-up words used for status is the Olive Garden restaurant’s catchphrase “Hospitaliano!”. I’m yet to find “Hospitaliano” in any Italian dictionary, and a Google search simply turns up references to the restaurant chain. So, it sounds like somebody just combined the English “Hospitality” and the Italian “Italiano”, then started throwing it on banners. Permissible, yes, but not responsible.

The Diagnosis

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t object to the use of foreign languages in American restaurants and clothing lines. I think that multilingualism aids in creating a healthier culture, and if anything, more people should be encouraged to learn foreign languages and use them even in American contexts (talking with American friends, for instance).

What irks me about Unnecessary French (and Italian) Syndrome is that it’s not actually anything to do with the languages themselves, but instead, simply a question of status. I suspect that I could write the French equivalent of “We have flaming porcupine my back pocket” on a designer t-shirt and sell it to the status crowd, and I’m not sure it would matter to them what it said, just that it’s in French. In these sorts of usages, the meaning is irrelevant, and the language used is really just a symbol worn by the people, roughly translated as “I’m better than you”.

The Cure

So, in an effort to preserve these languages and keep them from becoming mere status symbols, I propose that we linguistically oriented citizens take action. Here are just a few steps you can take to help raise awareness of Unnecessary (Language) Syndrome:

Don’t be mean. Don’t be cocky. Remember that the store clerks are likely just as oblivious to the linguistic posturing as the average customer. Just make people think. We can fight Unnecessary French/Italian/Other Language Syndrome together! Allons!

… well, nobody’s completely immune.

Tagged with Corporate Language, Language Humor, Language Usage, Sociolinguistics, Tirades | 4 Comments


Alright, so, I might be a bit of a Linguistics nerd, but this caught my eye on Slashdot today:

“You can now get GPLed JVM sources from Sun. Everyone seemed to be expecting the desktop version (J2SE) but J2ME has been released first. It looks to be buildable for Linux x86, MIPS, and ARM platforms. Sun now calls it ‘phoneME.’ Enjoy.”

For those without the technical background, Sun Microsystems, who created the original code to the popular Java programming language (used by many applications and websites), has decided to release the source code to that language, making it usable for anybody. This is very cool, and will be a huge step for open source software. w00t for Sun!

What caught my eye, though, is the name: “PhoneME”, which is a recapitalization of “Phoneme“, a linguistics term, indicating a group of sounds, which, although different in terms of sound and articulation, sound the same to a native speaker of a certain language (think the L’s in “People” and “Light”).

I’m not certain why they chose this particular name, but hey, whatever. Perhaps it’s a commentary on the fact that, although Java has many distinctly different libraries and implementation, all users view it as one thing. That, or maybe they just don’t have a clue what they did. Yeah, I’m gonna go with the second option there.

Tagged with Computers and Software, Corporate Language, Language Humor, Phonetics and Phonology, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 2 Comments

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