As very many readers will know, the head coach of the England men’s football team is Thomas Tuchel. He has been described as one of the best soccer managers in the world.
Tuchel grew up in Germany, and his mother tongue is German. He has recently been quoted in the British media, apologising for describing some aspects of the behaviour of his brilliant young England player Jude Bellingham as “repulsive”. In his apology, Tuchel said that he had used the word repulsive “unintentionally”.
But then he also said something very important. Addressing the journalists who were present, he said: “I thought I had a little more credit with you guys that I do all this in my second language.” Tuchel’s English is actually rather good, but it is easy to tell it is not his native language (a native English speaker would probably have said “credit for doing all of this in my second language”).
But he was making a good point. How many native English speakers reading this column would be entirely comfortable conducting a press conference in some language other than English, with millions of people watching around the world? I would certainly be very anxious about it myself.
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Learning to speak a foreign language fluently and accurately, to the point where you can always say exactly what you want to say and not say what you do not intend to say, is not an easy thing to do at all (see my column #233 on Robert Maxwell). And clearly Tom Tuchel did not realise how strongly negative the word “repulsive” is in English. (Most football fans would surely agree that Jude Bellingham is usually very far indeed from – to quote the definition given in the Oxford English Dictionary – “arousing intense distaste, disgusting and loathsome”.
Having to speak in a foreign tongue puts most people at a disadvantage, and often at a severe disadvantage, as we saw illustrated very clearly in that deplorable bullying session at the White House in Washington DC when the president and vice-president of the USA ganged up in the Oval Office on the president of Ukraine in a confrontation which quite deliberately made no allowance for the fact that English is Volodymyr Zelensky’s third language (after Russian and Ukrainian).
It would have been very much more satisfactory, of course, if Zelensky had taken the elementary precaution of being accompanied to the White House by an interpreter, although even that might not have defused a set-up confrontation.
We cannot, of course, say the same thing about the Tuchel interview, given the enormous gulf in relative importance between the two different encounters. But the moral of the Zelensky story is that people involved in international diplomacy really should use interpreters even if they believe that it is not truly necessary.
And the rest of us, especially those of us fortunate enough to be native English speakers, should make allowances for those who are having to communicate, in whatever situation, in an alien tongue, by slowing down when we speak and avoiding opaque idioms such as “you don’t have the cards”.
Sadly, we can be rather sure that there will be very little chance of Donald Trump or JD Vance being sensitive enough to heed this advice.
Heed
The verb to heed comes from Old English hedan “to observe; to take care, attend, care for, protect, take charge of”, from West Germanic hodjan, which gives us Modern German hüten “to guard, watch”. It goes back to Ancient Indo-European kadh– “to shelter, cover”. It is amusing but true that heed is also etymologically related to hat.
