The ONLY conundrum

I am not a native speaker of English; I am not a speaker of native English; I am not a native English speaker. In short, I do not know what I am when it comes to speaking in English.

But let me see how well native English speakers do.

In the document about business ethics of an MNC with HQ in the US, one reads, “Only [my emphasis] accept sensitive or proprietary information … when you really need it.” As a non-native speaker of English, I parsed it as “Only accept and do nothing else”, and came up with the question, “What else could I have done?”

Of course, I could have leaked the sensitive information and made money on the sidelines, like what Meiyappan of CSK is alleged to have done. But somehow, I believe, the intended meaning was more like, “Accept sensitive or proprietary information …only when you really need it.”

OK, that is an American MNC (it is funny that multinationals still sport a nationality!) and as the saying goes America and Britain are two countries divided by one language. Let me then show an instance of what appears to be misplaced “Only”, sourced from UK.

This is from an advertisement of an investment bank headquartered in UK.

“We only [my emphasis] win when our clients win.” What else would the bank want to do when its clients are winning? Lose? Whine? This non-native English speaker thinks the message is, “We win only when our clients win.”

Now, there are just too many instances of what I consider wrong placement of “Only” for it to have gone unnoticed. And, that observation takes me to another similar instance, expressed in an earlier post of mine [1], about knowing something fully well vis-à-vis full well. It is all in the native idiom, with its freedom to flout rules of grammar. Natives will understand full well better than fully well.

I neither understand nor practice the native idiom of English. Yet, I am on solid ground when I point out such alleged misplacements of only in non-native English speech patterns and writing. Obviously, I am assuming that the non-native English speaker is not tuned to native idiom. I must be allowed that freedom to assume. Otherwise, whether written or spoken by a native English speaker, the misplacements as I have shown are truly wrong, you must admit. Which one will it be? That is the ONLY conundrum!  

Raghuram Ekambaram

References

1.    http://nonexpert.blogspot.in/2013/04/im-bad.html

P.S (2013-05-29): From the book The Return of Depression Economics and the crisis of 2008, by Paul Krugman, Penguin Books, ISBN: 978-1-846-14239-0

"As long as home prices only [my emphasis] go up, it doesn't matter much from the lender's point of view whether a borrower can make his or her payments." Would it have been better said, "As long as home prices go only up, ..."? This is an instance that highlights the freedom enjoyed by native speakers in twisting the grammar of their language.

RE