By Interlingua trainer Norman
You Dutch are brilliant with abbreviations: You’ve got a clean, orderly arsenal of well-oiled little bullets, such as m.b.t., m.u.v., m.i.v., n.a.v., m.i.g., i.t.t. and o.l.v. Even non-natives can use them with precision. We Anglophones are less efficient. Depending on how you count, we’ve got either three (that’s right, just three) or approx. 50,000 abbreviations. And if you start firing too many of these around, you will not only miss your target, but you’ll commit (style) crimes as well.
The former figure, the three, represents e.g., i.e. and etc. – the classics. The frightening figure of course loosely welcomes the ever devolving post-literary howl and twitter of junk terms. The kind of McLanguage we and our kids slip into when chatting and texting: the LOLs, the OMGs, the LMAOs, the LMFAOs. And if you haven’t learned to use these yet, then keep up the good work.
In some ways more dangerous than the informal trash terms are the quasi-respectable acronyms, the ones we hear every day throughout our organizations. Abbreviations that lightly toss words like excellence, resources and governance in them. These are dangerous because we assume they’re clear. A few days before I wrote this piece, during a group lesson at a large bank’s headquarters, one of my eleven students mentioned something like ‘the INC&S’. When I asked what ‘the INC&S’ or whatever was, no one could say. All of them, however, were vaguely familiar with it. Most agreed it had to do with a system, or something international. (Or maybe it was just something like those.)
So for the Dutch, a nasty side effect of long familiarity with a nice efficient little collection of respectable Dutch abbreviations is false security in the non-universal English ones. The average user thinks along the lines of Well, my English is not perfect, so if I (sorta’) know this English term, then others should (sorta’) know it too, right?
Wrong.
Just now, seconds before writing this sentence, I randomly picked the letters F, R and M and googled them. I won’t bore you with too many of the 55 million results, but please consider the completely plausible, the completely legitimate and the completely forgettable Franchise Relationship Management, Fault Resilient Memory and Financial Risk Manager. (This last one is according to GARP. I’m not kidding, according to GARP. Who knows what or who GARP is?)
How clear is that?
I recently read that now is the first time in history that most writing is informal. Done by anyone with a device. It is no longer the domain of literati, of the technicians of the sacred. Whether or not this is a good thing I don’t know. But I do know that words, including abbreviations, are tools, as effective as knives. And knives, as any good cook will tell you, are more dangerous when they’re dull.
So keep your words sharp and clean, and don’t throw them around.
Norman
Taaltest
Wat is uw kennis van de Engelse taal? Doe direct vrijblijvend de taaltest!
Correct Engels leren?
Voor het leren of bijspijkeren van Engelstalige schrijf- en spreekvaardigheden kunt u diverse trainingen volgen. Altijd maatwerk, waarbij uw wensen centraal staan. Interlingua biedt een compacte online crash course Zakelijk Engels van 10 uur waarin uw kennis en vaardigheden snel up-to-date zijn.
Een overzicht van ons aanbod:
› Zakelijk Engels
› Engels effectief schrijven
› Effectief presenteren in het Engels
› Engels voor secretaresses
› Financieel Engels
› Engels voor Customer Service
› Engels voor HR professionals
› Technisch Engels
Vragen
Heeft u vragen, wilt u de mogelijkheden eens rustig bespreken of een offerte op maat ontvangen? Onze accountmanager Bas van Eck staat u graag te woord en helpt u verder! Voor een vrijblijvend adviesgesprek belt u 088 – 02 88 070 of stuur uw bericht via de contactpagina.
