The English problem

Posted on: 2 April 2026

Nobody filed a report. Nobody noticed, or if they did, they said nothing, which in London usually means the same thing. The meetings continued. The decks kept coming. The language that built an empire, that gave the world Shakespeare and the King James Bible and the Financial Times, quietly vacated the room and was replaced by something that sounds vaguely American but isn't quite that either.

It is a copy of a copy. Corporate American English, already a simplification of the real thing, filtered through two decades of McKinsey slide decks and then re-imported into the city that invented the original. The result is a dialect that no one owns, that no region produced, that carries no history and serves one purpose only: membership.

Because the mechanism is not linguistic. It is tribal.

When a strategist in EC2 says she needs to "leverage synergies across stakeholder touchpoints to drive meaningful engagement", she is not communicating. She is signalling. The sentence contains almost no information. It does contain a very clear message: I belong to this. I know the code. I have sat in enough of these rooms to speak the way these rooms require speaking.

The English language has always absorbed. That is its genius and its promiscuity. It took French after the Conquest, Latin from the Church, Arabic through trade, Hindi from the Raj. Every absorption added something: precision, texture, range. What is happening now is different. "Leverage" already existed. "Bandwidth" already existed. "Circle back" is not filling a gap; it is replacing a perfectly functional phrase with a degraded American corporate version of itself, then mispronouncing it slightly.

I have sat in boardrooms in the City where a partner, educated at Oxford, speaking to colleagues educated at Cambridge, produced forty minutes of presentation in a language that would have baffled his own grandfather. Not because the ideas were complex. The ideas were straightforward. The language was the performance.

And that is where it gets interesting.

The performance works only inside the room. Step outside, ask a black cab driver, a market trader in Bermondsey, a builder in Hackney and the mask slips immediately. The language that signals sophistication in a glass tower on the Thames signals something else entirely to anyone who grew up speaking actual English in this city. Cockney survived centuries of class pressure, of BBC English, of received pronunciation as social enforcement. It is not going to be impressed by "deliverables".

London's genius was always its layering: the RP of the establishment sitting alongside the East End's invention, neither quite defeating the other, both producing something richer than either alone. What the corporate dialect offers instead is flatness. A lingua franca with no origin, no texture, no irony. English without the English.

The city deserves better. It has the vocabulary. It has the range. It has centuries of accumulated linguistic intelligence sitting in its streets, its pubs, its literature, its music.

It is choosing, instead, to circle back offline and take this one to the next level.