Some years ago I was hired by an American bank. I received a letter from the Head of Human Resources that started `Dear John, I was quite pleased that you have decided to join us.' That `quite' depressed me. I thought he was saying, `We're kinda pleased but wish we had hired someone else.' A few weeks after I started work I discovered that in American English `quite' does not mean `fairly' as it does in English English, but `very'. At about this time my American boss told me to `table' an idea I had. So I brought it up at the next staff meeting, to his extreme displeasure. In English English `table' means put on the agenda while in American English it means take off the agenda.

The concept of the boss as ‘coach' is still in vogue. An analogy taken from sport, it is originally American training-speak and has been adopted extensively in Europe. But the role of the coach in American sport is very different from that in Europe. The team coach in the USA is what in Europe is called the team manager, an authoritarian figure who is solely responsible for selecting and managing the team and who frequently dictates the play. A coach in the UK has an entirely different role, that of trainer or tutor. I have seen an American boss and his British staff in complete agreement about the nomenclature of his role as coach but at permanent loggerheads as to how he executed it.

The potential for misunderstanding increases with people who speak English as a second language. The English that they learn in the classroom as children is not the same colloquial language that native speakers use. International English has a simple vocabulary and a standard pronunciation. Native English speakers have a variety of accents and colloquialisms and slang which foreigners find as difficult to understand as a Cockney does Glaswegian. At international meetings and conferences in English it is most often the native English speakers who are criticized for being unintelligible.