G20 sherpas

This was something I'd seen about a month back on TV. It was a news report about the G20 summit in Seoul and the 'G20 Sherpas'. The BBC describes them as "the faceless diplomats who lay the groundwork for high-profile international meetings such as the G8 and the G20."

While the BBC website writes 'G20 sherpas', what annoyed me a little with this news report, was that the word 'sherpa' was written with a capital 'S', so the label given to the interviewees was 'G20 Sherpa'. A quick search on Google shows that a number of other websites have also spelt it as 'Sherpa'. Some, like the BBC have written 'G20 sherpa' and some have written 'G20 'sherpa'' in inverted commas. (Note: the spell check on this blog site is also telling me that 'sherpa' without a capital 'S' is incorrect.)

Now I don't want to be one of those people who gets indignant for other people, but what annoys me about the use of 'G20 Sherpa' is that in this context, the use of the word 'sherpa' is reduced simply to an occupation. The same BBC article writes, "Sherpas are the tough and resilient Nepalese guides who help mountaineers scale Himalayan peaks."

It's fair enough that this is the common English definition for the word 'sherpa' - prior to to my visit to Solukhumbu or hearing about my friend Sara's research, I would have just used the word in a similar way. And if it's been borrowed into English as a kind of an occupation, then 'sherpa' should be fine. But then, the word 'Sherpa' means so much more than the job of 'person from Nepal to assists mountain climbers', since it actually refers to the ethnic, cultural and linguistic group.

So unless one of those G20 sherpas is actually Sherpa, it really should be written 'G20 sherpa'.