Parlez-vous startup?
On learning to speak new languages - all of them English
And with these three words starts this blog about ideas, languages, technology and culture. Tonguesten, our language startup is a year old, and to celebrate its 1st birthday, a few words on my feelings about the verbal world of the startup.
Education technology is a hot industry these days. But it isn’t easy to say who’s the one who has come of age, it or me: it’s not every year that you become a father for the first time. Last year, in her little office with a pot plant to her left and a ticking clock above her head, my kindly psychologist had some things to say to me about womb envy. I thought at the time it was unconnected - now I’m not so sure. It turned out that as my wife was about to give birth, so was I: Tonguesten and my daughter were born just weeks apart. In a sense they are twins, like the hero and India of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
But T10 (as we affectionately call Tonguesten in the team, like a Soviet rocket or a form at the Post Office) has been an exercise in formulating thoughts that have been ricocheting around in my skull for some time. I hope I can formulate them eloquently enough for them to be of interest to others too.
What is language and how does it work? My own experience is that it is a sticky ball of flypaper that rolls arounds our days picking up words. From birth it is dynamic, ever-changing. Its expansion happens so effortlessly that we hardly ever notice it - unless it is pointed out by someone else. But we acquire words - from friends, books, films - imperceptibly, daily and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Language is who I am. The words I’ve collected, and how I use them, are the most fundamental thing about me there is. Now that may sound a bit trite. But I believe that we choose our words like we choose our socks - we saunter into spangly shops full of new ones and pick some up on purpose, while the rest of them just appear in the drawer without our ever realising how they got there. I tried an experiment once in school when I was about 14. I came up with a new phrase (a surreal use of a swear word - I was 14 after all) and used it religiously for a few days to see if it would stick. And then a cool kid with an Arsenal season ticket who went on to marry a pop starlet casually dropped it into a conversation. It wasn’t quite immortality, but it felt good. And I started to notice how I spoke and how it changed depending on who was listening.
The venerable old dame of all things English, the Oxford University Press, measure the printed output of the British media and publish a Word of the Year every year to show us how language changes. This year it was omnishambles, and a year or two before that vlog. While that is all very zeitgeisty, it doesn’t teach us anything useful about how our own word bank morphs and swells as the months go by.
New words come into our lives like a new date: we’re tentative at first, slip an arm around their shoulder in the dark where noone can see. If things go well, we might step out in public. If people around us notice, they might get embarrassed, not quite knowing what to say. And if we’re really keen, we’ll see them every day until we can’t remember a time when we weren’t together.
Why do we use certain words? Partly we just like how they roll off the tongue. Me, I like the sound of ‘resolve’ - much more than resolution, which sounds too much like revolution’s puny little brother. More importantly,though, we like them for how they make us sound - more cool, more conservative, more approachable. Words are useful disguises we can try on for a bit and see if they fit: as politics has long known. Close your eyes for a moment and George W almost was that folksy small-town Southern businessman empathising with his fellow factory workers.
Words are so important to me that it’s almost a problem. I’ve turned down work because I would rather not be with someone at all who mouths off offensively: my ears just don’t want to hear it. Lily-livered? Maybe - I know some couples who abuse each other on a daily basis and still claim to profess undying love to each other mid- ”useless c***”. However much they love each other, I couldn’t be in the same relationship for a second.
I’d like to conduct an experiment on myself. Which words and phrases do I know now, that I didn’t know a year ago? That’s a good a way as any of understanding how T10 has influenced me. Parsing, that’s one. Metadata, that’s another. Natural language processing. A year ago, I couldn’t even have referred to the things that I couldn’t refer to - my idiolect was, well, idiotic. But now I can speak in a totally different dialect than I did last year. Lean, iterative, chunking, prototyping, wireframe, agile. Until this year, object-oriented was how I’d have described certain ex-girlfriends, not my iPhone.
In short, throwing myself into the deep unknown - as the newbie founder of a education software company - has meant learning an awful lot of new dialects. I’m learning to speak startup, banker, designer, programmer, researcher. I can chow down - or at least pretend to - with user experience designers, learning specialists, computational linguists and corporate investors. And if they do notice that I’m only pretending to speak their language - making grammatical errors left, right and centre - they’re mostly too polite to say.
