What Communicators can Learn from a Tough Cookie

Sitting at a traffic light the other day, we saw a city bus go past. At the wheel was a small, elderly-looking woman. In fact, she was likely not more than five feet tall and well over 60 years of age. My wife remarked that she must be a tough cookie.

My ever-literal son wanted to know what a tough cookie was. I knew what she meant, and my wife knew what she meant, but how do you define an idiom? Most of us figure out on their own what an expression like that means by considering the context. My son, however, is not into contextual reasoning. As smart as he is, he doesn't do idioms; his strengths lie elsewhere.

This episode was just the latest of many in our family, and it got my wife and me thinking about figures of speech, who uses them and who doesn't. My wife uses them a lot. I use them somewhat less, although more so when writing than speaking. My son uses them not at all and demands an explanation whenever he hears one.

But why does anybody use them? Could the aforementioned tough cookie not just as accurately be described in other terms? Of course she could. So there must be some other reason. In many cultures, particularly those with more of an oral tradition, conversation is a form of entertainment, and the ability to tell a good story or create a memorable turn of phrase is highly valued. This is particularly evident in agrarian societies, where people in work gangs perform strenuous, and often tedious, physical labor.

When I was in my late teens, I worked on a farm with my cousin in Quebec's Eastern Townships. One time we were out picking stone. This involves walking through a field alongside a slow-moving tractor and wagon, picking up rocks that had come to the surface during the winter and putting them on the wagon to be carted off. Some were very large and to this day I wonder how they could have come up so quickly. I remember coming across one particular rock that was too heavy for the three of us to lift together. The oldest of my co-workers, a man named Charlie, who was well into his 70's, said, “it would take 10 men and a boy to lift that one.” I didn't ask him the obvious question, which was why not 11 men? Or just 10? The answer is that "10 men and a boy” was more fun to say and more fun to hear. A statement like that got your attention. The older folks, in particular, can still tell a great story. This is a region that has never had cable TV and only got satellite service in the last 10 years, so conversation is very important to the people who live there.

What can we as communicators learn from people who have developed conversation into a form of folk art? One thing we know is that to these people, talking is fun. We also learn that there's no real benefit to being the “strong, silent” type. The ones who can make you laugh with a clever phrase or a good story get all the atention, while the quiet ones remain in the shadows.

Furthermore, we discover that it's not always about laughter. One of the most vivid descriptions I have ever heard came from an older working class gent I overheard while riding on a Toronto subway. In talking about a recently-departed friend, he said, “he was so crippled up from arthritis they had to bury him in a corkscrew coffin.” Not funny at all, but an evocative image to be sure.

The most important lesson, though, is that our communications have to be human; they have to read or sound like a real person would speak or write. And this is the most difficult lesson of all to embrace, especially for corporate communicators. It's so easy to get caught up in the jargon of your industry, or the language of subject matter experts and forget that the people we're trying to reach couldn't give a flying fig about what the scientists and the policy experts think is important.

What our audiences really want to know about an organization is this: Do we know what we're doing, is our product or service safe, and can they trust us? These are the questions we should be seeking to answer in all of our communications. And sometimes the best way to convey this message is through clever and not necessarily typical uses of language.