Rory Sutherland has become so well known in recent years that you probably don’t need anyone to tell you who he is. In the unlikely event that you do, he’s an author, a columnist, a speaker, a vice president of the Ogilvy agency and a leading populariser of a fascinating field with the unfortunately dry name of behavioural economics.
Sutherland came to public prominence by means of a 2009 TED talk, Life Lessons from an Ad Man, which was wildly entertaining from start to finish, but particularly notable for a brief discussion about trains. Why, Sutherland asked (I’m paraphrasing slightly), do people think that the best way to improve a train is to spend six billion pounds making it go faster? “What you should in fact do is employ of all the world’s top male and female supermodels and pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Château Pétrus for the entire duration of the journey. You’ll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.”
The talk in general, and this line in particular, inspired me to seek out other videos of Sutherland, which is how I came across The Lost Genius of Irrationality. In this, he addressed, among many other things, the question of why native English speakers seem generally unable, or at least reluctant, to learn other languages. He suggested – persuasively, I think – that we don’t usually need to, because speakers of those languages are so good at learning ours.
For example, he proposed that it’s not worth an English speaker learning Dutch unless they achieve a level of proficiency higher than that of an average Dutch person speaking English, which is extraordinarily unlikely. I thought this was a very good point, and provisionally accepted it as true because at the time I had never been to the Netherlands and therefore had no reason to believe that it wasn’t.
A few years later, I visited the country for the first time, during an absurd driving marathon explained in pitiless detail here. The interval between entering and leaving was no more than twenty-four hours, but within that period two events occurred which confirmed what Sutherland had said.
The first was in a hotel in Rotterdam. There were about forty of us, mostly anglophones, sitting at various long tables, one half of each attended to by a specific waiter or waitress. The food, which was marvellous, was arranged in two menus – one Dutch, one Japanese – and for each course we could choose from one, or the other, or both.
I don’t know what the reaction was at the other tables, but I and the people sitting near me were struck by the fact that the Dutch main course had the resounding name ‘beef and forgotten vegetables’. What, we wondered, might forgotten vegetables be? We asked the waitress, who was maybe in her late teens or early twenties, possibly a student who had found a job which would earn her some money before she graduated and could take up full-time employment, or equally possibly someone at an early stage of a career in the service industries. She told us that the vegetables in question weren’t so much forgotten as neglected, in the sense of having been used frequently in the past but less so now. I think she gave a few examples, but I can remember only one, which was that where there might otherwise have been turnips there were instead swedes.
I thought this was interesting, but I was also fascinated by how someone whose job did not obviously require a detailed knowledge of linguistics (though, if she was a student, that might have been her subject), and for whom English can have been no more than her second language, could make such a fine distinction between the words ‘forgotten’ and ‘neglected’, and explain it so precisely. I can confidently say that I would be be unable to do this in any language other than my own. The fact that someone else was capable of such a thing astonished me, but perhaps the Dutch find it unremarkable.
Late the following afternoon, I was at the Schiphol airport hotel in Amsterdam, readying myself with little enthusiasm for a drive which would end in the Cotswolds half a day in the future. I had said goodbye to my hosts, who had given me a ticket permitting me to leave the car park without demolishing the barrier, being shouted at by a Dutch policeman (as had already happened a few hours before, for reasons I won’t go into) and perhaps being incarcerated.
I entered the foyer of the hotel and found myself on a collision course with a cleaner, about the same age as the waitress in Rotterdam, who was pushing a large trolley laden with cloths and potions. She slowed down to let me past, but I thought, no, she has a heavy trolley to deal with, and I’m carrying a car park ticket. I should be letting her past, not the other way round. So I stopped, and made some gesture to indicate my intentions. She smiled and said, “Thank you,” and we continued on our respective ways for about two seconds. Then a thought struck me.
“Excuse me.”
She stopped when I said that, the very thing I had been trying to make sure she didn’t have to do. Silly me. “Yes, sir?”
“How did you know I speak English?” She couldn’t have done. Neither of us had said anything before that “excuse me”. And she explained.
It turned out that English is the language of the hotel at Schiphol airport, and everyone who works there is fluent in it. This made sense when I gave it some thought. The Netherlands is not a large country, and if you live there you can travel home from Schiphol reasonably quickly. You don’t need to stay at the hotel. If you do need to, you’re probably a foreigner, and in that case there’s a strong chance that you’re from the UK or North America, so English is your first, and very likely only, language. It must be a lot easier for the staff to be able to communicate in English than to have to wait patiently as whoever is trying to talk to them struggles to make themselves understood in Dutch, never having previously attempted such a thing.
Furthermore, if a visitor from another land can’t speak Dutch, and the staff member can’t speak the visitor’s native language (Japanese or Malay or Serbo-Croatian or whatever the case may be), it’s overwhelmingly likely that the visitor will able to speak English, at least to a level where it’s possible to survive in the Schiphol hotel.
English, the cleaner told me, is spoken so often in the hotel that the staff even use it when chatting with each other. It occurs to them only rarely, she said, that they could instead do this in their shared common language.
I met many interesting people during my brief visit to the Netherlands, but I like the fact that the two from whom I learned the most were a waitress and a cleaner. We should, I think, respect anyone who has either of those jobs, firstly of course because they are people just like the rest of us, and because their work is important, but also because they might be able to teach us things we didn’t know were there to be taught.
Top image of Schiphol airport by Ben Koorengevel via Unsplash.
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