BA’s unusually forthright attack on Unite contained more blood-and-thunder than we hear from the modern military. John Simmons analyses the language of confrontation.

I was quite taken aback when I heard BA’s chief executive Willie Walsh on the news. Negotiations had broken down with the union Unite and Walsh laid into them. It was an aggressive, even belligerent attack.

The language had been toned down a little in BA’s official statements and in Walsh’s article in next day’s Daily Mail. Even so ‘kill’ was in the headline and ‘death’ in the picture caption. I wondered how this verbal throwing down of the gauntlet might compare and contrast with the language of a real military man, so I turned to the recent Chatham House lecture by General Sir David Richards, chief of the British Army in Afghanistan.

The word clouds told some of the story but not the whole. For example, pick out the dominant words from Willie Walsh’s word cloud and you read “British Airways cabin crew unite”. Not really the message intended by Willie Walsh. But dig down a little deeper and you see that the range of the BA chief’s emotionally charged language allows him to come in under the radar of the word cloud.

So, phrases such as ‘blinkered efforts’, ‘economic swirl’, ‘temporary palliatives’, ‘negligible substance’ and ‘fruitless tasks’ are hard-hitting. They achieve their effect like a light-footed boxer jabbing and bobbing away rather than with the heavyweight smash of a repetitive right hook.

Similarly there’s an energy and dynamism in the verbs used by Willie Walsh – ruin, frustrate, wreck, fail, plunge. Combine these with emotive nouns and adjectives – ‘cold-blooded threat’, ‘God-given right’, ‘expendable victims’ – and you feel the effect of a verbal pounding. Yet each word is used once only, so the word cloud does not record their full impact. The most emotive word to emerge as a dominant element of Willie Walsh’s word cloud is ‘changes’, and that is surely significant.

‘Change’ has a similar weight in the General’s word cloud. Again it tells an interesting but partial story. Expected words emerge like linguistic weapons – ‘security’, ‘conflict’, ‘war’, ‘armed’. But when you probe a little deeper, and read such words in a fuller context, they are often qualified, reducing their potential harshness: ‘less risky’, ‘non-military’, ‘information dominance’. The General’s language is actually more measured, more balanced, more dispassionate. There is also room for empathy in this language with references to the ‘long-suffering people of Afghanistan’.

The General states clearly: “I am an optimist”. He’s interested in the ‘strategy’ of war, the need for ‘success’ and ‘solutions’. Yet inside this understanding velvet glove of ‘challenges’ there is a determined iron fist of ‘must’, a command that jumps out of the word cloud with a thump. Again the verbs are a revealing indicator: ‘rebalance’, ‘adapt’, ‘transform’. This military man is serious about achieving, or even winning, ‘change’. So we have an interesting situation of a business leader going belligerently to war, and using language with hostile intent. He’s in a battle where he rattles off short sentences and fires off phrases intended to cause hurt. The collateral damage might be the breakdown of relations and the forced rush towards all-out war. While the military man of war takes a longer view, even allowing his balanced sentences the freedom to see different points of view. He naturally sides with the language of negotiation and peacemaking. Or, to conclude with his own words: “It is this that makes the importance of winning the battle of ideology, of hearts and minds, so important.”

John Simmons is director of training and brand language at business writing and language consultancy The Writer - www.thewriter.co.uk