The Brits have failed........

I am not surprised at the emerging evidence that some people ate ‘chicken’ a few years ago through inflated pricing for the printing of ballot and examination papers. I am however surprised that the people called the British whose language we inherited alongside a slew of our own ‘native’ languages thanks to several years of their colonization in the early part of the 20th Century and who are supposed to be the defenders of proper diction, command and vocabulary required of the English language could fail so miserably when it comes to identifying someone to represent their business interests. ‘Willis the Wordsmith’ is probably furious they did not choose him!

It would be assumed that for an agent representing the business interests of a British company, the very basic requirement for such an executive appointment would be a suitable candidate identified after a well defined recruitment process who would be at the minimum someone with a good command of the English language in both its spoken and written form and well versed in the idiosyncrasies, grammatical requirements, sentence construction and rules required of being able to express oneself in the Queen’s English. After all, how would you be expected to converse with someone who cannot talk the same language as you?

But it looks like in their haste and probably without due care and regard to what would be considered proper employment practices, they have settled on a fellow whose command of the English language at least in its written form (since I have not heard him speak) could at best be described as wanting. This company is now a candidate for 'laughing stock of the year' in the British corporate world!

The diction and spelling of this agent can be best compared to that of a 6 year old just learning his alphabets. His keyboard continuously and shamelessly slashes, hacks and distorts what he is trying to say in his broken, grammatical style with no flair, no capitalizing of his proper nouns and no full stops and commas as required under the stringent rules of business English. It must have caused his employers to grimace now that every correspondence is being scrutinized in a court of law every time his emails and any other written correspondences that he may have penned are read out because with defiitely no secretary and no secretariat he must have been forced to write letters and emails himself.

This agent may have been brilliant in obtaining business for his employer in Kenya but the High Court in Britain should also bring charges of ‘assaulting’ the English language against both he and his employer to teach the British Corporate world a lesson in executive appointments!