When we communicate in a business environment, obscure jargon is an occupational hazard. Given how specialised are many industries and work environments, it’s natural that people will use a certain amount of terminology that won’t always make much sense to outsiders. The trouble is when this language is used in inappropriate contexts, or when it becomes so vague and jumbled as to be impenetrable even to its target audience.

Business depends on presenting a positive and knowledgeable front. It’s generally considered important to reassure stockholders and potential clients and investors – to talk the talk, and to downplay fears and bad news. Markets are notoriously sensitive. But there’s a fine line between optimism and fancy. Some people make a habit of bluffing; they conceal or avoid the truth through the use of gobbledegook peppered with buzzwords and clichés. For example:

In the current economic climate, we have a paradigm-shifting window of opportunity to capitalise on integrated sustainability in a value-centred industry environment, thereby incentivising operant personnel to migrate strategically towards asset realignment and deliverable frameworks for the bottom line of leveraging synergistic output productivity going forward …

It’s possible to find occasional half-sense in this muddle of management jargon. (I made it up, but it’s only slightly exaggerated.) Passages like this can sometimes indicate overcompensation for a lack of meaning or understanding, or sometimes a sincere and tantalising effort to convey plans and sense by someone who has simply lost the knack of doing so in plain English. Hence the recourse to what is, in the ears of most listeners, mystifying gibberish.

Plain-language alternatives to gobbledegook are not always available or obvious to speakers, and when we speak extemporaneously we’re under more pressure to keep talking than to carefully search for the best and simplest phrases. Used repeatedly, even the most hollow jargon can gain a woolly kind of meaning, and so its currency grows. String enough of it together, and you’ve got an impressive chunk of wordy nonsense that your boss might swallow rather than admit to not knowing what you’re talking about.

Why do we say that someone “turned round” (or turned around) and said something? It’s one of those  expressions people seem to find deeply irritating, and the standard response to what is perceived as “sloppy” English is to imagine it is nothing more than a meaningless filler. I tend to take the opposite view: language isn’t usually random, and most of the things we say or write arose for perfectly good  reasons… though, once in the language, they sometimes take on their own momentum.

First let’s see how this expression works. A trawl through Macmillan’s language database shows that in most cases it’s used with a “speech act” verb – say is by far the most common, but there’s also a nice set of words like criticize, condemn, blame, attack, and  accuse:

Then they have the bare-faced cheek to turn round  and accuse us of falling for the populist headlines!
I told this woman I worked with about it, and she turned round  and called me a murderer!

But I think the clue to how this usage developed may be lurking in sentences like these:

For me to turn round  and suddenly become a nationalist would be very odd.
It will take time for the committee, some of whose members have been urging rate rises, to turn round and vote for reductions.
I don’t think it’s going to be resolved because the Church can’t suddenly turn round and say that what we’re been teaching for years is wrong.

What’s happening here is that someone changes their mind, and this change in their ideological “position” is reflected in a literal change of position. (This is a common metaphor in English and other languages.) And after all, the related noun (turnaround) also means a change in one’s opinions (or one’s fortunes).

But, as many of the examples above suggest, the changes tend to be extreme – from one position to a completely opposite one, a volte face if you like (the same metaphor). And we can see in some of the other words here (suddenly, the cheek), and in the general tone of indignation, that changing your mind so dramatically is seen as unreasonable. These two ideas are nicely captured here:

The bank saw that my business was in trouble and called in my loan. But when I arrived to pay it off, the manager turned round and said ‘Oh if you can pay, there’s no need to’.

So the phrase comes to express a sense of surprise and outrage – then starts being used even in cases where there’s no actual “change of position”. However, there is still an idea of “turn taking”: someone says or does something, and someone else responds, in turn:

What is the point of having a Royal Commission fully investigate this matter if you are then going to turn round  and ignore its recommendations?
It beggars belief that there are those who are afforded sanctuary by a benign nation can then turn round  and denigrate the country and its citizens.
If students are given responsibility, they can’t just turn around and blame the teacher!

So the message to those who see this phrase as further evidence of the collapse of civilization is that – like most things in language – “turned round and said” is quite logical. It can be a useful way of conflating the ideas of a change of mind by one person which seems perverse (and possibly unfair) to someone else.

Cricket is the most quintessentially English game, but is famously incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been brought up with it. (The phrase in the title here makes perfect sense to an aficionado of the game but could easily be misinterpreted by anyone else.) George W. Bush – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – thought cricket “looks a bit like polo and baseball combined, only without the horses”. Hmmm … not quite, George.

One of the things that puts people off cricket is its apparently unfathomable vocabulary. But the language of cricket is just one of thousands of “sublanguages” in English, and like most aspects of language it has its own logic. Once you have cracked the system, it all becomes much clearer … and anyone learning any language will find it much easier if they understand some underlying “rules” about how language works.

So the idea here is not to indoctrinate readers into the language of cricket, but to use this as a medium to explore how language functions at a more general level. Cricketspeak is a microcosm of the English language, and of language per se. Think of a language as consisting of, first, a central core – the common vocabulary we need for any and every form of written or spoken communication – then, an infinite number of sublanguages, such as the terminology used by beekeepers, oncologists, online gamers, or language-teachers. Sublanguages tend to embody most of the features of a language system, so by learning about one particular sublanguage you can actually learn a lot about language in general.

That’s the premise behind this short series of blogs, which will show how most linguistic concepts can be explained and illustrated through the language of cricket. Future blogs in the series will look at concepts such as:

• word-formation: for example, how we often take English nouns and turn them into verbs (have you Facebooked anyone recently?)
• figurative language: metaphor, metonymy and similar processes are pervasive in all languages – and they have a key role in the way we attach meanings to words. These concepts can all be illustrated through the vocabulary of cricket.
• terminology: every sublanguage has its distinct terminology, and cricket – with terms like googly, yorker and doosra – is no exception.
• polysemy: how common words develop new and often specialised meanings: when we say a cricketer is on strike this has nothing to do with refusing to work, as we’ll see later. Most of cricket’s vocabulary is based not on obscure terms, but on very ordinary words (like the ones in the title above) that have taken on new meanings. Rabbit, duck, and lobster, for example, all have special meanings for cricket fans.
• gender, class and other sociolinguistic issues: like any other activity, cricket is played in a changing world, and its language reflects these changes.
• regional variation: how the same concept can have different names depending on where you are. Cricket started in England (well, probably – more on that in the next posting) but has spread to many parts of the world, and different speech communities have their own take on the language. There’s an incident in the movie Slumdog Millionaire where the kids are chased off a patch of private land where they’re playing cricket: the game’s epicentre is no longer the UK, but India – and this has implications for the language too.
• wordplay: this is a feature of language worldwide, and cricketspeak has plenty of examples.
• language change: everywhere in the language, older words fall out of use and new ones come along – but what are the mechanisms by which these things happen? Exploring obsolescence and neologism in cricket will help to reveal the rules behind these processes.

These are some of the topics we’ll look at in coming blogs. The principle behind all this is a belief that language is almost never random: the way it works and the way it develops tends to be governed by systems – some of which are mentioned above. These systems aren’t always easy to pick out among the idiosyncrasies of real communication, but they’re always lurking in the background. The more we understand about them, the better equipped we’ll be to teach, learn, and use languages – and cricket is as good a medium as any for this kind of exploration. Watch this space.

Read part 2 (origins) here and part 3 (terminology) here.