In a secret set of negotiations undisclosed until today, fifteen years ago Boston-based private-equity firm Bain Capital tried to buy out an important entity that, if the deal had been concluded, probably would have undergone a reorganization that would have forever changed the face of American culture and education.
For according to meeting notes discovered in the second left-hand drawer in the battered thrown-out metal desk sitting in the alley behind the town’s favorite Taco Bell, during several months in fall 1997, Bain sought in vain to purchase the English language.
The handwritten draft minutes of several meetings in September and October 1997 showed Bain’s principal partners trying to negotiate a deal even while it was falling apart after a personal scandal involving the interim CEO Bain had picked.
Like other private equity firms, Bain Capital purchases foundering enterprises, reorganizes them, often merging them in an effort to create a viable entity that can be sold in turn to others, leaving Bain with the profits from the turnaround. Often, the reorganization plans cause pain among employees who are laid off and who claim in retrospect that the private equity firm served as a capitalist vulture. Private equity defenders note that in many cases, the turnarounds save what would have been doomed businesses.
English did not turn out to be doomed, but Bain had plans for it nonetheless. According to the meeting minutes, 15% of the language’s letters would have been laid off, spelling would have been “brought up to date with twenty-first century world-class standards,” and it would have been rebranded in a tentative merger plan proposed by then-Bain partner Mitt Romney. Romney’s plan: take another language that is largely unused in the current business climate, combine it with English, and call the new language Englishanto, with a new logo that Bain had already commissioned from Boston-area firm Barrett Communications.
There were also plans to generate cash based on the considerable reputation of English as a language one could bet long on. Meeting minutes refer to apparent designs for collateralized debt obligations that would have generated millions of dollars Bain could use to pay its partners while the downside risk was entirely on English. One letter who avoids public exposure more than others agreed to talk off the record. “I heard rumors, wild talk that CDOs and credit default swaps were being arranged to bet English against Gaelic, English against Greek, English against French. It was un-American!”
But the deal was never closed. Things started to go awry during negotiations for a sensitive buyout of the letter e, which for years had dominated the unusual collective enterprise that linguists know as English Orthography. “It would have allowed e to participate in English for years to come,” said a former Bain partner speaking anonymously, “but it would have removed much of the power that e had held over others in the collective. We thought English needed to move in a different direction, and we were willing to let e save face as long as we could manage the transition effectively.”
Apparently, after e got word of the tentative plan to name ə as the interim CEO, rumors began to circulate in the Boston business community about the “dual loyalties” of ə (sometimes called Schwa). One meeting reported the complaints of Bain managers: “Rampant talk in Cambridge of ə‘s involvement in multiple languages. Keep in position or drop? First might call our judgment into question; second definitely would.” The rumors of a dual identity refused to die down; according to the letter interviewed for this report, for a birthday party a New York executive once created a joke jazz standards album titled “Swinging ə.”
“The party story didn’t help,” the consonant said while smoking outside the Sesame Workshop studio on Thursday, during a break in shooting.
“Or, rather, the quip didn’t help Bain. Me? I was gonna be laid off quickly, my career quaffed by quibbling over our historical letter combinations and dipthongs.
“Ahistorical bastards! Without me, private equity would be nothing but a nonsensical mess.”
Bain partners continued to try for a deal for a week or two more. But in late October 1997, seven weeks after the first meetings, the deal was dead. Within three years, Mitt Romney had left Bain and was enjoying a reputation as a turnaround artist at the Olympics, where English was remarkably competitive with languages from around the world.
“We can call it irony today,” said the letter, laughing bitterly and brushing ashes from its foot, “but not if the deal had gone through. If that had happened, I and three of my colleagues would be out of a job, and you could only call it the iron end of business.”