The following article by Mark Powell is taken from the MacMillan Education on-line teaching resource site.

Unnatural selection

Most Business English teachers would agree that a lot of idiomatic expressions we teach ("Sorry to butt in", "We seem to be talking at cross-purposes") are, in fact, quite useless. Now I'm beginning to wonder if some of the simpler ones aren't just as bad. Take this scenario:

Evidently, when doing business it doesn't pay to speak more natural English than the people we're doing business with.

In a recent multinational meeting, I heard little natural English. Nobody said "Why not ...?" or "How about ...?". Instead the Germans present used a very effective formula:

To make sure they got their message across, they simply named it. Noun phrases like these are common in German. And thanks to their explicitness, they're now catching on fast in international English. Needless to say, while other nationalities copied the Germans the British did not and struggled to be understood.

The evolutionist Richard Dawkins has suggested that ideas, habits and beliefs are copied from person to person like genes. He calls them "memes". Could international Business English be a meme too? Is the defective but effective English spoken by non-natives an improved, not impoverished variety? And if naturally selected by the majority of users, won't it be native-speaker dinosaurs who slip into extinction?