Talk:Zanny Minton Beddoes

Odd role in a business-news show
The striking name can't be mistaken; there used to be a business or economics program or program segment on TV (public TV is my guess) where she was on screen for less than a minute each night or each week (probably in the last half of the show or segment) but always introduced with her full name by the male commentator who did the rest of it. The tone always suggested to me that she was just there for a change of pace: she'd hand him a report that he would then describe. It would make sense if she had been checking, or adding the last available info to, a report that he may not have seen in its final form, drawing on her own expertise to select or interpret or summarize some up to the minute data. Silly me, i was inclined to construe her as at most a wife or right-hand assistant whose main contribution was just dependability, and her appearance on screen was eye-candy or a courteous recognition of her loyal service, but i'm pleasantly surprised to learn that she has big league biz credentials all her own. Is it clear how that visibility fits in with the rest of her career? --Jerzy•t 03:42, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * "Wall Street Week" (with Louis Rukeyser) popped into my head. The role for ZMB that i describe is at least partly confounded with LR's "Mrs. Smythe", who brought in guests. Could even be that Mrs S. at least once introed ZMB as one of LR's guests, and my poor brain mis-reconstructed the circumstances in the face of forgotten details. (ZMB is so much more memorable a name than "Mrs. S"!) --Jerzy•t 04:24, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

... and thus bilingual
The lede (lead?) strikes me as unfortunate: "Beddoes, the daughter of a German mother and thus bilingual, ..." That seems to imply that people with German mothers are generally bilingual. (That might well be true, by virtue of the fact that most Germans learn multiple languages in school, and are then bilingual. If that is the intended meaning, the sentence could be rephrased as "Beddoes, who is German and thus bilingual, ..."; or "Beddoes, who is a native German speaker and thus bilingual, ...") Furthermore, it does not specify which other language she is fluent in (though, given that she is the editor of The Economist, I'd be happy to venture a guess.)

My suspicion is that what makes her case special is not a German mother, but rather that her parents were of different nationality (and mother tongue), or that she was born (or grew up) in a place where the predominant language was not her mother's tongue. Thus, these alternatives would make more sense to me:

"Beddoes, the daughter of a German mother and bilingual, ..."

"Beddoes, the daughter of a German mother and a [British/Irish/Ugandan...] father and thus bilingual, ..."

"Beddoes, the daughter of a German mother, born in the [Bahamas/UK/US/...] and thus bilingual, ..."

Can someone who knows more about it fix it? Thanks. Fabianlischka (talk) 22:39, 12 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I removed the whole phrase. Using Google Translate, the source seems to support "German mother" but not the bilingual part, and I'm not sure if the translation is accurate. Altogether, it's not a huge bit of information, and can be restored in "Personal life" with clearer sourcing, which I could not find. --Tsavage (talk) 23:32, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

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