Life on the Road

Most people have had the experience, or soon will, of having to learn the vocabulary specific to a job they have taken on.  Every trade has certain “lingo,” “jargon,” or “trade talk” that outsiders won’t necessarily know.

My mom and my sister and psychologists, so they not only havesome weird words, but they also have very specific connotations for words that many of use in a generic way:  behavioral, analysis, schizophrenic, DID, PTSD, personality, psychotic, paranoid, and even break.

When I started learning to sew cloth diapers, I learned all kinds of terms and acronyms like sham pocket, soaker (both kinds), aio, fold-over elastic vs. lastin vs. polybraid, and pul.  How would someone who wanted to do that for a living expect to be able to communicate with her customers without those words, as well as a bnuch more like 3-step zigzag, hidden snaps, felted wool, or turned & topstitched? 

You simply have to know the lingo to do the job.  Right??

Okay, so let’s put this together with a recent bad experience of mine.

A while back we ordered some pizza from Pizza Hut (see why Pizza Hut is FIRED).  When it arrived, the order was very, very wrong.

I told the deivery driver that there was a problem, but he just looked at me blankly.  Finally he shook his head helplessly and said, “No Hablo.”

You know what?  I really don’t care if he doesn’t want to learn English well enough to communicate and function in society as a whole.  That’s his problem.

But if he’s going to do a job where he has to interact with English-speaking people, he needs to learn about 20 job-specific words that will enable him to do that job to a minimum level of competency.

In this case, he should know things like:

• Pizza
• Hot, cold
• The names of various toppings
• Credit card, cash, signature
• Problem, wrong, missing, good, bad, etc.
• Pizza delivery! Please, Thank you, You’re welcome
• And a fallback… “One minute – I will call the store”

I mean really!

I worked in one of the food service areas for a while when I was going to college at UCLA.  They had a full-time staff of kitchen help that was primarily Hispanic, and a bunch of part-time students.  I almost always worked in the muffin-baking area, and I almost always worked with the same young man.  He only spoke about 20 words of English, and my High School Spanish realy didn’t address the things I needed to say.

So you know what I did?

I learned the words I needed to know! 

I learned how to say flour, dough, mix, bake, done, and muffin in Spanish…  And that was just so I could make better conversation with a fellow employee!  My job was primarily to sell the muffins to the English-speaking customers.

It’s true that I believe that English should be recognized as the “Official Language of the United States,” but when you get right down to it, this isn’t even about English.

This is about job-specific vocabulary.

If you can’t do the job because of a vocabulary barrier, you shouldn’t be hired.

I like that: 

It’s not a Language Barrier that’s the problem, it’s a Vocabulary Barrier.