Un-original Thoughts

Yesterday a small group of us had an informal lunch with the CEO. It was a fairly open dialogue, as far as these things go, given that CEO’s and CFO’s of publicly held companies these days have to be very guarded about everything they say. If they make a commitment they can’t live up to, they can get sued; if they say what they think might happen, and it doesn’t, they can get sued. Reminder to self: work on how to appear transparent without actually being transparent.

Toward the end of the hour, as we were talking in general terms about the company’s compensation policy, and how the company—and society—determined a person’s value, the CEO referred to “utils”. It went right by everyone; one of my co-workers thought he said “oodles”—our topic was money and she had been preoccupied with getting lots of it. Utils, in economics, is a measurement of utility, which in turn means the power to satisfy wants. Example: my 1967 VW Bug can satisfy my want for transportation; nevertheless, it has fewer (a lot fewer) utils than a new BMW.

The way we speak, including the words we use, betrays our origins. Our CEO used to be a finance professor before he decided to see if classroom concepts would work in rough-and-tumble reality. He sprinkles his conversation with words like “utils”, not to show off, but because he genuinely likes economic theory and is well-acquainted with its jargon. In one of the most popular plays of the last century, Shaw’s Pygmalion and its musical incarnation My Fair Lady, the protagonist, Professor Henry Higgins, can decipher a person’s home district in England after a few seconds of listening to that person’s speech.

I can usually tell if a man (it’s often harder to guess with women) hails from my home state of Hawaii due to his pidgin inflections, which do not necessarily correlate with his range of vocabulary or the ability to speak in grammatically correct sentences. Of course, once he uses a word like “pau” for finished or complete, that’s a dead giveaway. (Parenthetical remark: the wonderful thing about the Internet is that I find out about subjects, like linguistics, that I never learned about in school.)

Will the mass media and the impetus toward language homogeneity eliminate distinctive regionalization of speech patterns? Not one of my A-list concerns, to be sure, but I, for one, will mourn a little if Island English disappears. © 2004 Stephen Yuen


Some of my co-workers enjoyed the 80 degree weather along the Embarcadero today.