Divided By A Common Language

You’ll like this one.

Three people are sitting in a news meeting – an Englishman, an Australian and an American.

I work for a large company which employs many of people from all around the world and there are many accents to be heard in the corridors and around the coffee machines. Especially with working in London, it’s an international company anyway, so there are all sorts of creeds there.

Creed. I use that word, like I know what it means. To be honest, reader, I really don’t. I’m a smart chappy and you can look at me with my words, but I don’t know what a creed is. Unless you mean Appolo Creed. And even that I suspect is fancy talk for Creed With Chicken.

Anyway, big company. They do internet stuff among other things, and a lot of news – they handle tons of coverage which gets to a screen somewhere in front of you. That’s stuff which most people call stories, audio, video, graphics – but it’s all content. And when you break down content electronically, it’s data.

So “data” is a word that came up a lot in a meeting today.

In the UK, we say data in a way which would rhyme with how Americans say beta. But how British people say beta would rhyme with how Americans say pitta, which British people say in a way which would rhyme with how Americans say hitter. And Australians say data in a way which would rhyme with how British people say charter. It’s a spoonerism of “tah-DA”, like something Cavid Dopperfield would say.

And it carries on like this and no one wants to bend to how the others are saying it. But because of how my head works, I try and thing of ways to get the Australian to say “dahta schemata”, being certain that when he did, I’d jump up and go: “IT MEANS NO WORRIES … FOR THE REST OF YOUR DAYS…”

I’da done it too. Srsly.

Then I’d ask the American what was the matter with the datta and try and get him to look later at the data.

What I’m saying here is that we all speak the same, but we can each sound like drongos, twats and two-bit mothers.