A colleague once got corrected in a client meeting for using the word “presently” to mean “soon”. The correction came from a senior expat who wanted everyone to know that “presently” actually means “at present”. He was, technically, half-right and about two centuries out of date. “Presently” has meant “soon” in English since the 1400s and “at present” since the 1500s. Both are correct. Both have been correct for as long as anyone reading this has been alive, or their grandparents, or theirs.
My colleague, writing in her third language, said nothing. What she did, quietly, was stop using it altogether. That’s what these corrections produce: smaller vocabularies, more hedging, writers who trim their range to avoid the next lecture.
English in the Gulf is a working language for people who grew up in Beirut, Bangalore, Manila, Cairo, Lagos and Manchester. A client briefs an agency briefs a journalist briefs a reader, across three or four first languages, and everyone in that chain is reading for meaning. They’re not auditing your prose against a version of English taught in a particular kind of British school in a particular decade. And yet a small, well-networked minority treats that version as the standard and their register as the ceiling. The rest of the room is doing the actual work.
This matters more than it seems, because “correct” English in an expat-heavy market is a status marker before it is a communication tool. Which word you reach for signals which school you went to, which passport you hold, which decade you arrived. It has little to do with whether your reader will understand you. In a region where the audience is multilingual by definition, insisting on English calibrated for a monolingual reader is a category error dressed up as craftsmanship.
Here is the joke.
The people doing the correcting are, more often than they’d like to know, wrong.
At a dinner recently, someone told me with great confidence that “blood is thicker than water” is a truncation. The full saying, he explained, is “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. Chosen family beats blood family. He looked pleased.
He was wrong. The covenant version is a late-twentieth-century invention, popularized by the author Albert Jack and the Messianic minister Richard Pustelniak, both writing in the 1990s and 2000s. The original proverb goes back to the twelfth century in German, appears in English by 1412 in John Lydgate’s writing, and has always meant what most people think it means. Family bonds run deeper than other ties.
This happens a lot. “Jack of all trades, master of none” gets rescued with “but oftentimes better than a master of one”. Modern addition. “The customer is always right” allegedly ends “in matters of taste”. Snopes and Quote Investigator both looked; there’s no evidence Selfridge or Marshall Field ever said the qualifier. It was added later by people who found the original inconvenient.
The corrections feel deeper because inversion feels like insight.
There’s another category worth naming, the one that trips up working writers. Some words have drifted so far from their dictionary meanings that using them “correctly” now reads as an error. “Begs the question” describes a specific logical fallacy. Almost nobody uses it that way, and if you do, a sub-editor will change it. “Nonplussed” means confused. American usage has flipped it to mean unfazed, the near opposite.
The dictionary is on your side. The reader is not. This is the writer’s actual problem, and it has nothing to do with dumbing down.
Good comms writing makes a call here, rather than avoiding one. You can decide the dictionary meaning matters and take the hit. You can decide the new meaning is now the meaning and use it that way. What you cannot do is use “nonplussed” hoping half your readers hear one thing and half the other. Ambiguity in service of hedging is bad practice dressed as caution.
The best writers I’ve worked with make this call word by word. They know “begs the question” will get flagged both ways depending on who reads it, so they write around it. They know “literally” now functions as an intensifier and use it with intent, or don’t. They know their readers aren’t all the same, and that clarity is measured in the reader’s head rather than the writer’s.
The senior expat at that client meeting meant well. He wanted to signal that he knew something the rest of the room didn’t. What he actually signaled was that he was working from a half-remembered rule he’d never checked, and that he was more interested in being seen as correct than being understood. That’s a small vanity, and the same one that makes comms professionals reach for words they think their readers should know rather than words they know their readers will understand.
The same logic holds for a message house, a key line, or any brief you write for a client. The job was never to sound impressive. It was to make a specific audience think, feel or do something, and language nobody fully understands does none of the three.
Write for the 80%. Not because the 20% don’t matter, but because most of them are the 80% wearing a different hat, and the ones who aren’t are usually wrong about which hat they’re wearing.
Eduan R. Maggo is a strategic communications specialist at APCO in Dubai. A former editor, he blends storytelling, messaging and media relations with training in strategic foresight to advise public and private sector clients across the region.
