Off to give some specialist skills training in The Hague on Negotiation, including a session on Ambiguity.

A good place to start is UNSCR 242, where differences over the absense of the word ‘the’ in the English version but not the French version continue to bedevil the Middle East peace process decades later.

This reminds me of a famous smutty English case which turned on the meaning of the word ‘with’.

Man X enters a public WC cubicle. In the adjacent cubicle Man Y (who does not know Man X) is busy performing a lewd act. Man X peers at this through a handy hole in the cubicle wall. Man Y notices that Man X is watching, but proceeds withal.

Police swoop. X and Y are charged with an act of indecency ‘with’ each other. So what does ‘with’ mean?

Guilty. How times have changed. Nowadays that would be a supposedly edgy BBC family comedy show routine.

Anyway, if people want to disagree they’ll find ways to do so, using the tiniest linguistic subtleties if that helps waste time and create annoyance. Ambiguity is embedded deep in the language, so there’s nothing to stop them.

However, there are techniques available to help manage such problems and create an atmosphere conducive to constructive dialogue. If you want to know what they are, you’ll have to pay haha.

Things must (sic) go better for me than they did last week at the Speechwriters Guild event. I planned to give a short presentation based on dictating the talk into my MacBook Air and having the words appear on the big screen via voice recognition software. The point was to show that it is better to speak a draft speech than write it – spoken words have an indefinable added directness and authenticity.

Alas the formidable Dutch Speechwriter on before me would not allow me to set up my computer lest her own presentation be messed up. So I failed in the short time available to get the IT sorted and ended up looking a trifle ridiculous.

Moral: Never Assume