Is Scheming Negative or Neutral?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how are you doing? This is Bill Underwood from Fishers, Indiana.

Welcome, Bill.

What can we do for you?

Well, I was listening to your show and I came up with a word.

I was in South Africa a few years ago working for equipment manufacturers, helping them open up new markets across Africa and the Middle East and Latin America.

On my first trip to South Africa, my contact there at the end of the day, after I demonstrated the television transmitters we were talking about, said he would like to have dinner with me so that he could discuss a scheme that he thought would benefit him and me mutually.

And, of course, I was taken aback because the first thing I thought was he wanted to involve me in some sort of nefarious plan of his that involved something illegal, because that’s what I thought of when I heard scheme.

And, of course, it wasn’t until after we had dinner and I found out what he really wanted to talk about.

I sort of used context clues, if you will, and found out that for him, scheme just meant a plan, not something nefarious.

So he didn’t save it with an evil laugh or anything like that, rubbing his hands together.

No, but he didn’t have a big smile on his face.

He was a Zulu fellow, so he had sort of a thick accent anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

He said, Bill, I would like to discuss with you a scheme that I think would be beneficial to you and me.

And I said, well, that doesn’t sound too good to me.

Oh, wow.

That’s a great cross-cultural collision there.

But you figured it out.

Right.

Absolutely.

And so your question is, why the difference?

Yeah.

Why the difference?

And why do we see the word, or I guess I assume that most people in this country would think that you were talking about some sort of nefarious plot.

Yeah.

Whereas over there in South Africa, maybe even in the UK, I’m not sure if it’s in there.

Why is it so much different?

That’s right.

Yeah.

In the United Kingdom and all of the Commonwealth countries, as far as I know, that is pretty much everywhere except Canada and the United States, scheme the noun.

Let’s be careful.

It’s just the noun.

Tends to be kind of neutral.

Tends to just mean plan or program.

Just something that we’re going to do.

Some list of things or something that is about to happen or that we’re going to put on the schedule or on the calendar, that sort of thing.

Now, you can put value on it.

You can come up with a negative scheme.

So this is his scheme to take over the world.

Certainly you can have that in the United Kingdom or South Africa as well.

But generally, without any kind of qualifier, scheme alone on its own is generally neutral.

Whereas in the United States and Canada, scheme is assumed to be negative when it’s on its own.

Now, the verb is different.

Scheming, pretty much anywhere in the English-speaking world, is assumed to be negative, whether or not you’re in North America or the UK or Australia, antipodes of South Africa.

So that’s really interesting, right, that we have this divergence.

But it all boils down to the fact that the Englishes have kind of been split for so long, and they’ve kind of gone their own way.

They’re all children of the same parents, and they’re related, and they send letters back and forth, emails, if you will, and there’s some communication, but they take their own path.

And so scheme is one of those words that, for some reason, along the way, just decided to take its own path for those of us in the United States.

Partly it’s affected by things like pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme, which are very common terms in the United States.

We often associate scheme with those kind of shenanigans.

Yeah, and then on the other hand, you’ve got the term color scheme.

You know, what’s the color scheme for that event?

So scheme isn’t always negative here.

But again, on its own, we don’t assume it’s neutral.

We assume it’s negative.

Maybe because my mother used to call me a little schemer when I was young.

She did.

When I was sort of going against the grain.

You little schemer, you.

But the scheme turned out to be very beneficial.

In fact, all he wanted to talk about was using the technology that I had introduced to create a distance learning system for students out in the farther reaches of South Africa so they could learn from teachers in Johannesburg.

So it did work out well.

Sounds like you’re doing good work out there.

Absolutely.

Actually, today I am surrounded by a group of very well-behaved first graders.

I’m a substitute teacher now in Fishers, Indiana.

Oh, my goodness.

Can we say hi to your class?

Say hi to the class, yeah.

Hi, class.

Hello.

There you go.

I told them to be extra quiet when Colin said, I thought I heard some noise there.

I said, they promised to be quiet, and they have been.

So thank you, children.

Well, Bill, we’ll let you get back to the kids.

We appreciate you taking time out of your busy day.

All right.

Thanks so much.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, call us to talk about language, 877-929-9673.