I thought I knew...until just yesterday

I thought I knew...

until just yesterday

October 13, 2013

By: Gina Yoryet Roman

I thought I knew English until just yesterday while reading ‘Think in English’ magazine, one of the best and most complete resources I use in my intermediate and advanced classes. 

“I’m glad we’ve had this opportunity to touch base because it’s really important that we are all singing off the same hymn sheet. We’ve had some bandwidth problems, so we need to do some blue-sky thinking in order to leverage and monetize our relationship with customers. Probably, we can pick up some low-hanging fruit and get some quick wins but we’re also going to have to peel the onion to come up with a robust, end-to-end, seamless strategy to repurpose our product portfolio and enter the webcast space. I’m sure I don’t need to stress that this is a mission critical. I’m going to be out of pocket for the next week if anybody needs some face-time, they can talk to me off-line. It’s important that you stay in the loop. I hope that’s clear.”

A great majority of times when I read and work with British English, I have to re-read the text once or twice to make sure I am at least getting the right main idea. Then I have to interpret it to American English, and finally decode it into Spanish. I’d normally get annoyed to have to go back to a particular text and not be able to decipher it, unlike British English; it doesn’t irritate me, on the contrary, I find the entire language and accents from different regions very attractive. If I had been given the opportunity to live and study abroad once again, I would have settled upon British English without a doubt. At least I get to talk to two of my little loves (A. W. R., and E. M. R.) on the phone every once in a while and hear their cute little British accent. 

Anyhow, just by looking at the text and each phrase, I could tell the meaning but I looked them up only to make sure and here’s  run down of what I found out:

1. Singing off the same hymn sheet = Be pursuing the same objectives. American Englsih: To be on the same page.
2. Bandwidth problems = (In this context), Problems with resources. 
3. Blue-sky thinking = Imaginative brainstorming, the generation of highly creative ideas that may not immediately be practical. 
4. To monetize something = (I knew this one), Make something profitable, convert something into money.
5. Low-hanging fruit = Work that is easy to find.
6. Get some quick wins = Progress fast, advance with little effort.
7. To peel the onion = Analyze a problem layer by layer, examine every facet of a difficult situation.
8. Come up with = (I knew this one as well).
9. Robust = (The adjective itself clearly explains its connotation: Strong, that functions well under pressure and difficult conditions.
10. End-to-end = That covers every part (From customer service to internal operations).
11. Product portfolio = All the different products that a company produces.
12. Webcast space = The context in which webcasts are posted.
13. Mission critical = (This one is self-explanatory and I’d seen it many times before): Very important for one’s business objective.
14. To be out of pocket = Be unreachable, incommunicado. 
15. Face-time = A face-to-face conversation.
16. Off-line = (This one is very commonly used), in this context informally, after the meeting.
17. To stay in the loop = Be in a situation in which one will receive all the relevant information from one’s colleagues, be well-informed of the latest news about the project. 

The beauty and marvel of each language is that we can explore, learn, juggle a game of words and broaden our horizons. All of the aforesaid is what makes me love being bilingual, bicultural and biliterate and it would have been magnificent to have grown up speaking three or four different languages but I can at least take advantage of the two languages that I’ve mastered since my first years of existence and make the best of them.