The following sentence is from this past November 7th’s New York Times article titled “Rove’s on-air rebuttal of Fox’s Ohio vote call raises questions about his role”, dealing with Karl Rove’s clear contradiction with Fox News’s call regarding Ohio voting for President Obama:
“So at 11:33 p.m., Megyn Kelly, an anchor known for her no-nonsense style, began her walk down the hall and did the questioning. The leader of the decision team, Arnon Mishkin, laid out its case, with some help from a more polished television presence, Chris Stirewalt.
“Arnon doesn’t do TV very often, and Megyn can be very pointed,” Mr. Clemente said. “So I said let’s have Arnon with the facts, and Chris — because he’s on TV every day — to put it in English.”
I don’t understand the exact meaning of the ending phrase, “to put it in English”, because all concerned are Americans speaking the English language. Is this a jocular, or does it simply mean “to speak plainly”?
I suspect I would offend the native English speaker, if I ask him/her “please put it in English”, as it may sound like he/she speaks circuitously, or badly.
Best Answer
The more common way of expressing this idiom is to say, "put it in plain English," as opposed to just "put it in English." There is also another common expression, "Can you put that in English, please?", which is used to ask a speaker to restate what they've said in simpler, clearer language.
Mr. Clement seems to have conflated these two phrases when he said, "put it in English," and that he essentially meant "put it in plain English."
This fits the context, since Arnon does not have experience speaking simply and clearly to an audience, whereas Chris does.
Here are the Wikipedia entry on Plain English and the Free Dictionary explanation of the idiom in plain English.