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The International Herald Tribune has affiliations with newspapers in many other countries, including Kuwait, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Russia, Greece, Spain, Egypt, India, and Pakistan. The typical arrangement is for the local paper to circulate an English edition of its own paper with the IHT. Its circulation is relatively small—200,000—but its influence on world affairs is considerable.

Books also have become conveyors of the language. Millions of people around the world have become fans of British and American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, John Grisham, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer. For individual results, however, none can compare with J. K. Rowling and her series of Harry Potter books, with more than 400 million copies in circulation.

INTERNATIONAL BIZ ENGLISH

Especially since the turn of the twenty-first century, English has been not only preferred but required for doing almost any business internationally. Sales presentations, conferences, and negotiations are now conducted almost entirely in some form of English, whether formal or informal.

For business, it is also obligatory to train employees, manage websites, do research, prepare advertising materials, and be able to converse with customers all over the world in English, if not also in their native language.

At Tieto, a Finnish company with international business, its English-language website offers the services of its 17,000 “experts” in solving information technology (IT) problems for business primarily in English. An attorney for the firm Feodor Bratenkov says, “It would be just impossible to conduct any international business without having such a common means of communication as English.”8

In fact, many firms conduct their own classes in English and even use it in interoffice memos. Almost every industry or large group also has its own special words and phrases that constitute a unique dialect. Examples are Insurance English, Automotive English, Oil Industry English, Legal English, and even Illegal English, a term used to keep students from speaking English at Middlebury Language Schools in Vermont.

Inevitable in all corporate English, of course, is a shadow lingo, a type of corporate slang that author Lois Beckwith calls “corporate bullshit.” Her 2006 book of that name says, “More people than ever before are using more bullshit.”9 The volume is filled with such terms as bring to the table, crackberry (addiction to a Blackberry phone), deets (details), feedback, focus group, glass ceiling, micromanage, and move forward.

CORPORATE JARGON IS ALWAYS SHOVEL READY

Here is my sampling mostly from Beckwith’s book: When setting up a PowerPoint presentation, it is mission critical to circle the wagons before making a world-class commitment. Every participant will need some face time with a real people person and a chance to kick the tires of the plan to be networked. First, a heads-up about going for the low-hanging fruit and not considering the mission critical, which should be an excellent teachable moment. If you don’t see a paradigm shift by the end of the day, you might be considered roadkill.

ENGLISH IN WORLD ADS

Similar terms are used to sell American goods and services abroad. In fact, American English is the most used language for advertising virtually anything across international borders, whether the advertiser is based in the United States or elsewhere.

Ads are usually tailored differently from country to country, not so much because of different languages but because of different customs and circumstances. They also must comply with the various laws and regulations dealing with decency and how much nudity can be shown in advertisements.

It pays to have an intimate knowledge of the local scene. The McDonald’s restaurant chain found that out through experience. In 1996, an adult comic magazine named Viz filed suit, charging that some ad words had been stolen from the magazine