Learning Versus Education | Jerm Warfare

**Jerm** (0:30)
My name is Jerm, this is Jerm Warfare, the Battle of Ideas. We were just joking a moment ago about the difference between US and British English. And I mean, I know you like language and words and that kind of thing.
So supper and dinner. So you say dinner, right? Is that what you said?

**Peter Duke** (0:49)
Here in Southern California, yes, I say dinner.

**Jerm** (0:52)
Now, as I understand it, there is actually a difference between the two. I don't know what the difference is. I just know that if I eat food at night time, then the term is supper. We don't say dinner really.

**Peter Duke** (1:07)
Well, I think I'm not an expert on supper and dinner, but I think supper is earlier than dinner.

**Jerm** (1:14)
Yes, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, but where I was actually going is, I read something very interesting last week, that the Americanization of the English language was deliberate by a man named Webster.

**Peter Duke** (1:32)
That would not surprise me. And if I found out that Webster was a Freemason, that wouldn't surprise me either.

**Jerm** (1:39)
I haven't looked that up, but I'm sure there's something there.

**Peter Duke** (1:44)
But you're hitting the whole note about what I write about, which is epistemological warfare. And changing...

**Jerm** (1:51)
The epi-war.

**Peter Duke** (1:52)
Yeah, the epi-war. If you change the meaning of words, you change the belief of the people who are using those words.

**Jerm** (1:59)
Well, this is exactly it. I was watching a trigonometry episode a few days ago. I don't know if you know trigonometry, the British podcast.

**Peter Duke** (2:08)
No, I was thinking about the math class that I never took, but go on.

**Jerm** (2:12)
No, it's so they call it trigger, not to trigger or like trigger as in to get triggered. I think that's how you spell. Actually, I don't even know how you spell trigonometry. Is it with an O?

**Peter Duke** (2:26)
That's a good question.
I'm not sure off the top of my head. I can Google it if you'd like.

**Jerm** (2:34)
Peter, we don't use Google. Yeah, I'm sorry.

**Peter Duke** (2:36)
Okay. All right.
The funny thing is though that you bring up a... You might not have known this about me, but I ran e-commerce at Virgin for five years. And it was very...
And so I worked with people from all over Great Britain, you know, from London, city of London, okay, which is a different dialect. A lot of people don't realize that. And, you know, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, I worked with people from all over the Commonwealth. And Winston Churchill famously said once that the United States and Great Britain are two countries that are separated by a common language. And I wound up spending most of my career at Virgin doing nothing more than translating from one group of English speaking people to another set of English speaking people all sitting at the same table, because we would use words thinking that the other people who spoke the same words meant the same thing that we meant.

**Jerm** (3:50)
That's interesting.

**Peter Duke** (3:51)
And they don't. I'll give you one quick example. When the Virgin Megastore Online was launched, the online e-commerce site did not have the ability to reduce prices for a certain amount of time on a specific piece of merchandise. In the United States, we call that a sale. And when the developers were building the website before I was engaged, the president of Virgin Mega Online was a guy, a barrister from the city of London. And when they asked him if they needed, the developers asked the president of the Virgin Mega Store Online, if they needed to build a function that would allow us to merchandise, basically lower the price of something for a limited amount of time, they used the word sale. And he said, oh no, sales are absolutely not in the virgin culture. We don't do that.
And they were so concerned about it that they actually filled out a memo and they made him sign it. So then I got hired. And then when the website went live, the new general manager wanted to do what he referred to as a campaign.
And a campaign in English, English is the same as a sale in American English. And we didn't have the ability to do that. The developers didn't build that functionality into the website. And so it became a big, it became a big kerfuffle. But at that point, I realized that I needed to make sure that the people from England understood what the people from America, that the people from New Zealand were, that we were all saying the same thing, because in many cases we weren't.