The Language of Commercial Shipping and Trucking (Yawn)

And actually, come to think about it, just about every other profession.

I was putting together a piece this morning for the Handy Shipping Guide, a process which, as usual, involves a lot of fishing around, checking sources etc. and I came across a blog that caught my eye. Now as blogs go this was a little similar to this one, an excuse for a tired journo to let off a bit of steam, to write in a slightly more colourful manner than one is allowed to when scribing the “front page” stuff.

The piece itself was on the current state of the US trucking industry and as I was drawing the threads together and reading this guys two pennorth, I realised that, once again, I was having to translate the thing in my head. This bloke doesn’t write in English. He writes in American, and not just American but a sub culture language, American trucking. In fact, to be precise, he writes in US trucking with a North Eastern American dialect.

If any of you don’t follow that statement then, unlike me, you don’t have to spend a lot of time on the net. In the course of our work here we have to study information coming in from around the globe seven days a week. Whether you study the US haulage market, Indian rail freight or Chinese imports you start exactly as with any foreign language only it’s a lot simpler.

If you wash up abroad in your travels then you listen out for details in a language you can identify and then try to make out the whole meaning. What I’m talking about is like that, only a lot easier. You understand the bulk of the words but there are bits that simply mean nothing, so you have to consider the context.

Take the word “drayage”. You’ll find it all over US truck sites but not in any English Dictionary (well not in my big Collins anyway). As there are about a million words in there and Mr Collins must have taken three lifetimes or employed a lot of his kids for a very long time to put this mighty tome together, you can more or less assume that most English speakers have never heard it uttered in anger. Dray – yes, from the Norse, Draga, also a vehicle or sledge for heavy loads (ah ha!) or bizarrely, a squirrels nest.

Before my American readers sign off in disgust I should make it clear that I’m not looking down my nose at their use of language (I shall save for another time the fact that “Color” actually has a U in it and that you are an “I” short in aluminium) no, it’s just we not only all speak differently but that this trait transfers over to the written word and language in general.

A US trucker reading the blog piece this morning would have probably followed it swiftly to conclusion understanding every line. Muggins here had to read each syllable through to the end then go back and translate. Here’s an example of what was written – “Drivers can’t be ticketed if they’re driving to a depot with a snow scraper” Now in this case any UK resident would understand all the words but most would say “snow scraper?” The blog is written in New Jersey, they’ve passed a very common sense law saying if you get nicked with a pile of snow on your rig, car whatever, then you get a fine. They get a lot of snow in NJ.

Now any English speaker knows what a ticket is, don’t they? Well no. Because anything we type in these little boxes goes all over the world there may well be an Inuit tucked away somewhere who knows all about snow but nowt about tickets.Equally the Thai Pirates mother in law had to be shown a handful of the cold, white stuff when on a visit to the UK as she’d never seen it back home.

Having read the above mentioned piece it turns out that a snow scraper is basically a set of football (sorry soccer) posts that you drive under to wipe the snow off your motor to stop the accumulated precipitation blowing back and wiping out granny in the Nissan Primera driving behind you.

A very sound and sensible idea by the way (brushing off the snow, not wiping out granny). Must be very sophisticated posts, $18,000 a set according to my source blogger.

Anyway whilst translating the above I realised that all industries tend to develop their own, sometimes exotic language which is hard to follow if you’re an outsider. The reason for this is tricky and complex. The ultimate example is the trappy PR/Sales type executive who spouts utter nonsense with an air of arrogant conviction. This language strangely seems uniquely transatlantic and I put this down to a sort of verbal one upmanship. Wherever your salesman hails from if he gets caught out by a word or phrase he can’t follow, he licks his wounded pride and simply catches out the next guy with it.

This new modern garbage is matched by a form of words used by the older professions which have somehow now become respectable due to the original insular nature of the profession involved (hence drayage) or simply by long term use what was a “buzzword” used in one particular trade becomes the norm.

This is particularly noticeable in shipping terms, which by their nature are trans global. So “Bill of Lading” evocative of standing on the quay as a clipper ship sails majestically on the morning tide, then slipping back down the frosty street for a pint of warm ale and a pipe of good shag in a welcoming tavern (sorry, went into Thomas Hardy mode there) becomes “Waybill” which brings to mind waiting at a formica counter for a quadruple rag bag of multi layered, multi coloured NCR paper of which the last two pages (your copies) are unreadable.

Shipping in fact has taken language to a whole new level.

Not content with bastardising existing words and phrases our transport forebears decided at some point to invent lots of terms and then turn them into acronyms. And so was born the set of Incoterms which now stretch into the realms of the fantastic, obscure expressions nobody outside of a hundred mile radius ever uses, like the myriad species of lake trout that are, well, trout with spots in different places.

Of course this hybridisation of language has gone on since man first started grunting.........

So to help you read this piece here is a glossary of terms used, just in case I puzzled anyone with anything.

Truck – Lorry – Rig         Trucker - Driver - Chauffeur          Bloke – Chap – Fellow    Haulage – Trucking – Shipping              Drayage (work it out, we’ve done that one)                 Nissan Primera – Toy Car          Nowt – Nothing – Nada       PR – B/S    Sales Executive – Unemployed Politician  Trappy – Gobby – Verbose       Garbage – Stuff and Nonsense         Norse – Geezer with Horned Helmet         Geezer – See Bloke   Buzzword – B/S             Formica – Melamine – Shiny Plastic  Thomas Hardy – Possibly worst ever English novelist      Two Pennorth – Very badly misspelt Tuppenceworth – Twenty Cents worth          Misspelt - Misspelled – Just Plain Wrong    

Acronym – Spending countless hours trying to turn a fairly meaningless phrase into a form of words beginning with both vowels and consonants, which, when the initial letters are all put together form a word which nobody but the author will ever like or remember the meaning of without looking up the full term on the internet using the aforesaid acronym.