Feature deletion

The MP Norman Baker became briefly famous a few years back for inciting us all to stop using the standby buttons on our electronics.

The energy wasted on standby was equivalent to three million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year in the UK alone.

Everyone agreed that this was a terrible problem, but what could be done?

Surely, we were all just too fat and lazy to stand up and turn the TV off properly.

Cultura Franca

There is a bogeyman that lives under the beds of all BE students.

It comes out when all the lexis has been mastered, and all the skills honed.

It is a 50-metre wall.

It is a lake of fire.

It is quicksand.

It, of course, is culture.

BELF-U-Like

Rory Sutherland, one of the UK's leading ad-men, tells a great story about how Frederick the Great of Prussia re-branded the potato.

Frederick was very keen for his subjects to adopt the potato in order to stave off famine and stabilise the price of bread, so he made them a compulsory crop.

Frederick's subjects, however, were less keen, claiming they were not even fit for dogs to eat.

They hated the potato.

Despite meting out some severe punishments, the potato, like the 3rd person 's', simply did not take.

So Frederick resorted to Plan 'B'.

The waiting game

Learning a language takes a lot longer than ordering a McDonald's, but the two do share a common problem.

This problem is not McNuggets, or even 'Employee of the Month' posters; rather, it's the problem of managing expectations.

As a fast-food restaurant, what irks customers of McDonald's is waiting.

Generally speaking, you don't wait long at McDonald's to be served, but as you don't expect to wait long, any wait at all is a long one.

As the always-interesting David Maister points out, customer satisfaction bears little relation to reality and is, in fact, the perception of a service minus the expectation of one.

8 out of 10 BE students prefer it

The other day, a student of mine was discussing a few idioms with me.

He's an upper intermediate student, and I was advising him that he didn't need to master idioms just yet.

I suggested that native speakers tended to use idioms a fair bit, but the majority of English speakers, non-natives speakers, did not use them very frequently at all.

My student digested this information for a few seconds.

Business English: Working in the Lemon Market

Sam Levenson once remarked that we must learn from the mistakes of others because we  can't possibly live long enough to make them all ourselves.

Nowhere is this advice more pertinent than in the case of second-hand, or as Americans more tellingly describe them, used cars.

Most buyers of used cars are beset by the problem of asymmetrical information.

Unlike the seller, they don't know if the car is in good condition or not.

In all likelihood, they don't even know what 'good condition' is either.

Affordance

I was recently given an e-reader.

It was a great gift and instantly became my favourite gadget.

Suddenly, I had a portable library of 100s of books to take with me wherever I went.

I was smitten.

And because I have taken it everywhere with me, lots of other people have handled my e-reader too, mostly out of mild curiosity.

What has struck me about this is that everyone has tried to use the e-reader in the same way.

Simplicity is the Last Refuge of the Complex

NOT SO long ago, I set up a social network for my school.

I had run a single class trial the previous semester and it had been a great success.

Back then, I'd used a simple blog.

It had done the job, but it didn't really allow me to offer a full-on Web 2.0 experience.

If I wanted that, I needed to organise a proper social network with all the bells and whistles only it could provide.