Your phone skills cannot be divorced from your phone language and manners.
A mastery of Phone language naturally gives you the communicative edge. Your phone skills cannot be divorced from your phone language and manners. You could lose a job, get a contract, win a friend, or increase the number of your enemies by being shambolic, rude or courteous when you interact using a phone.
Language.
The English language has quite a number of phrasal verbs and expressions that are deemed polite and appropriate while making a phone call. You can make a call, put a call through to someone, cut the call or hang up. You get off the phone, hang on, hold on, call back, get cut off the phone, pick or answer a call, speak up etc.
‘Thank you for calling,’
‘Could you please speak up a little?’
‘I’m afraid, the line is breaking,’
‘Sorry you could not get through to me, my battery was flat all morning,’ ‘kindly pick your call,’
‘I won’t call back tomorrow,’ etc. These expressions are flexible in meaning.
There are some of them that you use in situations that don’t have to do with phoning. You may ask a person to wait in an ordinary situation by just asking them to ‘hold on a minute.’ However, people take advantage of the flexibility to perpetrate semantic violence on phone English.
When the network is bad, we sometimes blame it on our phone, line or number. Actually, not being able to hear the other person well could be as a result of any of those. We tend to express this as bad as possible because, of course, we have ways with language when we are short of words.
You have attempted calling someone on phone but you have not recorded a success. How do you clothe this in words? Note these: ‘I have been calling your number but it is not going through.’ ‘Your line was not going through.’ ‘Your number is not connecting.’
Let’s take it one after the other. ‘I have been calling your number but it’s not going through.’ What a sentence! This is ambiguous. Do you mean you have just been calling loudly the phone number of the person you hope to speak with or you have been dialing their phone number?
Passing across the message correctly
What kind of number are you talking about? There are different kinds of numbers. Phone number. Street number. Exam number. Serial number. You do not have to keep mentioning your phone number because people can get your meaning by virtue of the words that surround the word ‘number.’
Even if we accept the fact that other co-texts can help clarify your meaning, how about the illogicality in the number that is not going through? When you make a phone call, it is not the supposed receiver’s number that should not go through, rather it should be your number because you are the one trying to create a connection.
The ‘going through’ part is not bad because a line, number, or call can come through or be rejected. You may keep calling/dialing the line or number of an unwilling receiver who could keep rejecting your call. If a receiver picks your call, then your call has come through. Someone might also put you through by connecting your line to another line like secretaries do.
Instead of saying ‘Your line was not going through,’ you can conveniently put it thus ‘I could not get through to you or your line.’ Instead of ‘Your number is not connecting,’ you can have it like this: ‘my number/line isn’t connecting to yours.’ Stopping at connecting leaves your sentence floating because a finicky listener might want you to finish it up by asking ‘connecting to what?’
Let’s now create sentences that will conveniently help us out here. The next time you are not able to get to a person by phone, these are some of the ways you can express it:
-
I tried reaching you by phone but your line/number was not reachable.
-
I dialed your number several times but I could not get through to you.
-
I attempted reaching you but your line or the network was busy/bad.
Do you have other apt ways of expressing this? Do not hesitate to let us know.
Written by Omidire Idowu.
Omidire, Idowu Joshua writes, edits and proofreads for publication firms, individuals, and online magazines. Reach him via noblelifeliver@gmail.com or @IAmEagleHeart (twitter).