Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 4; July 02

If only they'd asked a linguist…

Mike Rundell

In 1979, a Californian student, Brenda Spencer, killed two people and wounded nine others when she went on a killing spree at her high school. In a subsequent interview, she said she had opened fire because "I don't like Mondays". (This later became the title of a well-known song by the Boomtown Rats.)

Though few of us would go this far, Spencer isn't alone in her feelings about the first day of the week. A quick look at corpus data throws up lines like:

I hate Monday mornings!
…exceptionally high absenteeism on Mondays
Ever had that Monday morning feeling?

One corpus line sums it all up:

Most of us experience "Monday morning blues" - the feeling of tiredness and low spirits on the first day back at work after the weekend rest

But hang on a minute. Last month we learned that PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting ("one of the world's leading providers of management consulting", according to its website) has changed its name - or "rebranded" itself, to use the correct jargon - to "Monday". They even have a special website to launch their new identity (www.introducingmonday.com), where we learn that we have all badly misjudged Monday. Apparently, "Monday is a fresh start, a positive attitude, part of everyone's life… Monday is confident. It stands out, and it stands for something". Meanwhile, a press release announcing this rebranding exercise asserts that Monday evokes "fresh ideas, hot coffee and doughnuts". (I am not making this up.)

Am I missing something here, or is this the biggest load of corporate drivel you ever heard? … Or perhaps not, because there are plenty more examples where that came from. As the rebranding virus sweeps through the boardrooms of our finest companies, marketing gurus compete with each other to dream up ever more vacuous mantras. Try for example the "accenture" website (www.accenture.com), which devotes several pages to its "rebranding story". This is an organization that used to have the perfectly innocuous title "Andersen Consulting", but has recently turned itself into "accenture", with a bogus accent (>) sitting pointlessly atop the letter "t". We are told that "The change to the new name expresses not only what we have become as an organization but also what we hope to be." (No, I don't understand this either.)

Lest you imagine that this is just me indulging my prejudices (as if!), there is a serious corpus element to this story. The biggest rebranding flop of recent times occurred in the UK, with our very own postal service. This venerable organization was known as the Royal Mail until it was persuaded by a clever PR consultant to change its name - at vast expense, no doubt - to "Consignia". Apparently, the new name was "a better fit" with the company's business strategy. For Consignia aspired to do more than just send letters and parcels through the mail: it would "consign" things using a whole range of delivery systems.

There is just one problem with this, however. Regular readers of this column will be familiar with the idea of "semantic prosody" - the tendency of some words to be regularly associated not simply with particular collocates, but with a whole semantic class (see for example July 2000). We have seen that the verb cause, for example, has an overwhelmingly "negative prosody", in that over 90% of the nouns that it governs relate to bad things of one kind or another (death, illness, disasters, problems, embarrassment, and so on). But if cause is a somewhat negative word, it pales in comparison to consign. It is almost impossible to find a single context in which consign appears in a positive light: it must be one of the most negatively-charged words in the English language.

The examples that follow are a pretty representative selection from a number of corpora, and they all tell an unmistakeable tale.

My friend and training partner, Sue Atkins (who had the original idea for this article), has analysed the collocational behaviour of consign in the BNC, and produced the following profile of the words that appear with it most frequently:

• the dustbin (6% of all instances, of which half were the dustbin of history)
• oblivion (5% of all instances)
• hell (4%)
• the scrap heap (3%)
• a museum (3%)
• an institution (1.5%)
• memory (1.5%)
• obscurity (1.5%).
• perdition (1.5%)
• the past (1.5%)
• the rubbish heap (1.5%)
• the wastepaper basket (1.5%)

Among the patterns emerging here, the dominant ones are the ideas of getting rid of something you no longer need, condemning someone to a very unpleasant fate (Hell, unemployment, misery, a life of poverty), and of marginalization (the wilderness, oblivion, the sidelines, "special" schools, and even "expensive nursing homes"). Given what we know about this word, how could anyone in their right mind have thought "Consignia" was a good idea? It helps to have a corpus, of course, but surely anyone with an ounce of linguistic intuition should have realized that a company called Consignia might not be the best way of engendering consumer confidence. Would you trust your salary cheque with an outfit whose business was "consigning" things?

The latest news, by the way (www.consignia.com/about_us/) is that Consignia has decided to change its name yet again. From now on it is going be called - wait for it - Royal Mail plc. Great name: now why didn't I think of that?