Magic Words: International
Magic Words: International
I know a teacher trainer who styles himself an ‘international teacher trainer’.
This seems a slightly unusual collocation, so I put my thinking cap on and came up with my list of collocations of the word international, which I have grouped for convenience:
Business
an international best-seller
an international film
an international flight
an international venture
international brands
international cargo
international delivery
international freight
international standards
international tourism
Crime
an international drug ring
international arrest warrant
international crime
Events
an international competition
an international conference
an international crisis
an international football/rugby/ cricket match
an international gathering /festival
an international incident
International Women's Day
Institutions
an international association/organisation/institution
an international bank
international school
the international community
the International Court in The Hague
People
an international career
an international celebrity/movie star
an international client
an international courier
an international model
an international reporter
an international reputation
an international sponsor
an international student
an International Students’ Officer
international patients
the international jet set
Places
an international airport
an/the international border
Relations
(an/-) international outrage
an international agreement
an international perspective
an international scandal
an international treaty
at an/the international level/on an/the international level
international alliances
international coverage
international efforts
international goodwill
international law
international relations
the international situation
Now I suppose an international teacher trainer is analogous to an international model, though in a different field. Interestingly, we don’t say international politician or international scientist. Such people may be internationally renowned but they are not international per se.
Why then would one want to be an international X?
The word ‘international’ gains its cachet, its glamour, from being in a larger arena than the merely ‘national’. Being on the national stage is parochial compared to being on an international one.
Since its coining by Jeremy Bentham in 1780 in the term ‘international jurisprudence’, it has grown in use, especially with the growth of international trade due to the Industrial Revolution, then steamships in the late 19th Century, and then again with the growth of commercial air travel in the post-World War 2 world, as can be seen in this Google Books ngram below.
Figure 1: Google Books ngram for ‘International’; American English Corpus; Source
I think that it is this post-1945 increase which gives ‘international’ its attractiveness for some teacher trainers, and the like.
Commercial aviation really took off after WW2 with the many C-47 Dakota planes available for air services, then the advent of the jet age with the Comet airliner (GB) and the Boeing 707 (US). This can be seen from the term ‘the international jet set’ from above. Such commercial travel was only available to the rich and/or famous or those sent on business by their wealthy corporations. This was the era before cheap flights and budget airlines.
While I took my first flight from England to Singapore in a VC-10 in the mid-60s at the age of six weeks courtesy of the Royal Air Force, the vast majority of passengers were aristocrats, politicians, rich business tycoons and Hollywood royalty - these last people really gave the fledgling airlines their air of glamour. Air travel, international air travel, was exclusive; it was expensive; you were wined and dined in great luxury, and clouds of cigarette smoke. With the advent of the Anglo-French Concorde in 1969, that exclusiveness was turned up to 11, to supersonic speeds and the ability of gaining precious time, and arriving in London, Paris or New York fresh and wide awake, rather than tired, crumpled and bored out of your mind.
Picture magazines in the late 50s and the 60s, like Life, were full of photos of the amazing new sleek silver machines, the piled high matching leather luggage, and the beautiful chic uniformed air stewardesses (as they were then), the cordon bleu meals (on china plates, with metal cutlery), and tall glasses of frothy champagne, the film star (Elizabeth Taylor; Richard Burton; Sophia Loren; Grace Kelly; Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh) and playboy passengers, and the cool, handsome pilots, all affecting to talk like Chuck Yeager, the coolest test pilot of them all. This is where the glamour of ‘international’ came from. And this is why it’s better to an international teacher trainer than just a teacher trainer.