silly season in parliament? August 8, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : language , add a commentThe UK’s Public Administration Select Committee’s Fourteenth Report on how to achieve a balance between the public interests in allowing former ministers and civil servants to publish information relating to their jobs and in keeping some of that information secret has a title with some rather unsavory connotations: Mandarins Unpeeled: Memoirs and Commentary by Former Ministers and Civil Servants.
more reflections on knitting and the financial markets August 5, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : language , add a commentAs I think about the grandma “sticking to your own knitting” stories, it seems to me that the phrase likely originally includes the idea of minding one’s own business - which is a bit different from the idea of focusing on core strengths. I’m not suggesting at all that knitting is frivolous, and thus has little relationship to the financial markets. Some practitioners take their work very seriously indeed: in fact their attention to detail might be useful in the financial markets (see, e.g., the recently published Recommendations of the SIFMA Credit Rating Agency Task Force, suggesting that CRAs could have been more focused on details and on communicating those details.)
knitting and the financial markets August 4, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : language , add a commentHow did it come about that focusing on core business activities is described as “sticking to your knitting”? This is what HBOS’ CEO announced last week that the bank would be doing. Larry Elliott in the Guardian says that this is “a phrase that tells you much about the new mood of sobriety in a chastened financial sector.” The term seems to be accepted London market slang, but it’s also used by Michelle Leder at footnoted.org, and is also used in the world of politics (see also this brief critique of buzzwords (including the knitting phrase)).
A slightly different take on the phrase turns up in a sermon:
My grandmother had a saying. When someone was involved in things they shouldn’t be, she’d say, “They should stick to their own knitting.”
Other peoples’ grandmothers seem to have used the same saying. The quote above suggests that the crucial aspect of the phrase may be the focus on one’s own knitting rather than on others’ activities, which is consistent with the use of the phrase. But why has a phrase which includes the word knitting become so commonly used in the context of financial and business activity? Invoking the idea of knitting suggests a return to more traditional and careful practices. It’s sometimes used to mean that people are not being overly ambitious:
he was not going to have any plan, and after the fire it became even more obvious that we ought to be sticking to our knitting and not producing what he would call grandiose plans for the future.
But there’s a particular weirdness about the popularity of the knitting phrase in the context of corporate and financial activity. Knitting is an activity traditionally performed by women (often grandmothers), and many (most/all?) of the business leaders who use the phrase, seemingly unselfconsciously, to describe what they are doing are male.
regulatory anachronisms? March 31, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : language , add a commentWhy does the antiquated term blueprint feature in the title of a document which purports to be about regulatory modernization?