Recently in writing Category
It was this: "Snoring is a silent killer."
I know, I know, when the marketing jackals sink their fangs into a word it instantly becomes overused by definition. But all of the sudden I'm seeing all sorts of things described hopefully as "vibrant," the hope being, of course, that rather than think about what the word really means, you'll read it as "very very good and worth spending money on." I noticed a long time ago that careful writers are at least mildly interested in what the word they're using means—its denotation. But marketing people are almost exclusively interested in the connotation—the things we associate with the word, and especially the emotions it evokes. People can be vibrant, and often we like such people. Cities can be vibrant, and often we enjoy visiting them. But this?
Vibrant Technologies buys and sells used IT equipment including servers, storage and networking equipment. A top reseller for used server and refurbished ...Some people are vibrant, as we've noted, and some places. But I can't imagine how a refurbished server or a person likely to be selling one could possibly be described as vibrant. Anyway, connotation and denotation, OK? Thanks.
I know, deep apologies, the last blog-free period this long was probably when I was in Christmas Island on the other side of the world. My excuse? Well, all together now, because you've heard this one before: I've been very busy lately.
But I just had to rush to the keyboard and mention this failure to use common sense in headline writing. I'm rushing out to get food, and I grab the mail, and here's the beautiful glossy newsletter from a certain area hospital, and I look at the headline: "Exploring the Hidden Risks of Heart Disease."
Now here's the thing. Everyone in the publishing world has met marketing people, highly paid marketing people, who just weren't that bright. You wind them up and they natter out a stream of buzzwords without ever actually, you know, doing anything, creating any value, that sort of thing. But the fact that this was offered as the best headline the marketing folks at the hospital could think of and then sailed through what is doubtless a series of about seventeen people checking everything over—well, I'd have caught that one. If you would like to hire me to work for the marketing department of your hospital just get in touch.
But I just had to rush to the keyboard and mention this failure to use common sense in headline writing. I'm rushing out to get food, and I grab the mail, and here's the beautiful glossy newsletter from a certain area hospital, and I look at the headline: "Exploring the Hidden Risks of Heart Disease."
Now here's the thing. Everyone in the publishing world has met marketing people, highly paid marketing people, who just weren't that bright. You wind them up and they natter out a stream of buzzwords without ever actually, you know, doing anything, creating any value, that sort of thing. But the fact that this was offered as the best headline the marketing folks at the hospital could think of and then sailed through what is doubtless a series of about seventeen people checking everything over—well, I'd have caught that one. If you would like to hire me to work for the marketing department of your hospital just get in touch.
I feel a little sad in a bemused, contemptuous way, having just read that The New York Times may be putting all or some of its content behind a paywall simultaneously with the coming launch of the rumored Apple tablet computer. These guys! They're as smart as they can be, and as good at what they do as anyone, but they just don't see the obvious—they think that if they just latch on to the right platform, the newspaper can come back, the same as it ever was.
A lot of newspaper and magazine people refuse to see that the Internet was a millennial change in communications technology—it changed everything, including the kind of content people want and will pay for from the media. I suppose the Times execs who think the tablet will save them are stuck indefinitely in the denial stage of death. And I guess they imagine that when Apple brings out its tablet, all of the sudden people will be reading the Times again at the breakfast table, or standing up in the subway, holding the grab bar in one hand and the tablet in the other, reading the Times. And people will pay for the Times again because they always wanted it all along, the same as it ever was, but on a computer, with videos and slideshows and so forth. And if the staffers can't do that stuff, shoot, just get some intern to do it. How hard can it be, right?
It reminds me of some poor sap who thinks a lover will come back some day. I actually heard Steve Lopez, a popular columnist, railing on the radio about the newspaper business like he was a jilted boyfriend. "You'll miss us when we're gone!" he said. It was sad. Lovers and customers leave because they don't want you or your product. You think they really want and need what you have to offer, and they simply don't understand that they want and need it. They're temporarily confused and deluded, but in time they'll realize and come back.
But they don't, do they? Not very often. If you think and expect they will, the deluded one is you. It's not stupidity—smart people do this denial stuff all the time. But the tablet computer will not magically revive periodical publishing and it won't bring back the buggy whip industry either. Ask Jack Shafer if you don't believe me. I wish it could—I was a newspaper and magazine guy in the happiest years of my life, and I'd love to see it come back the way it was. I wish it would. But it won't. Adapt or die—that's the only thing that's the same as it ever was.
A lot of newspaper and magazine people refuse to see that the Internet was a millennial change in communications technology—it changed everything, including the kind of content people want and will pay for from the media. I suppose the Times execs who think the tablet will save them are stuck indefinitely in the denial stage of death. And I guess they imagine that when Apple brings out its tablet, all of the sudden people will be reading the Times again at the breakfast table, or standing up in the subway, holding the grab bar in one hand and the tablet in the other, reading the Times. And people will pay for the Times again because they always wanted it all along, the same as it ever was, but on a computer, with videos and slideshows and so forth. And if the staffers can't do that stuff, shoot, just get some intern to do it. How hard can it be, right?
It reminds me of some poor sap who thinks a lover will come back some day. I actually heard Steve Lopez, a popular columnist, railing on the radio about the newspaper business like he was a jilted boyfriend. "You'll miss us when we're gone!" he said. It was sad. Lovers and customers leave because they don't want you or your product. You think they really want and need what you have to offer, and they simply don't understand that they want and need it. They're temporarily confused and deluded, but in time they'll realize and come back.
But they don't, do they? Not very often. If you think and expect they will, the deluded one is you. It's not stupidity—smart people do this denial stuff all the time. But the tablet computer will not magically revive periodical publishing and it won't bring back the buggy whip industry either. Ask Jack Shafer if you don't believe me. I wish it could—I was a newspaper and magazine guy in the happiest years of my life, and I'd love to see it come back the way it was. I wish it would. But it won't. Adapt or die—that's the only thing that's the same as it ever was.
I have a long, still-unwritten post about the fascinating subject of my refrigerator that I'm procrastinating on. So while I muster the energy to do that, here's another quick list of pet writing peeves, things that make me wince when I see them used in copy:
On Steroids: This was really kind of tired the first time it was used to mean something that looks like something else but bigger. There are so many ways to say that one thing is bigger than another. Do we really need to keep flogging this particular phrase?
The New Black: This is, or was, a trendy way to say "trendy." I suggest saving the keystrokes and just saying "trendy."
X is the new X-10 You've heard this one—fifty is the new forty, and so on. But nothing has changed, it's pretty much the way it's always been—some people age very gracefully, others hit a wall early, and the rest of us tend to look, and act, our age. An acquaintance of mine was sitting around once with friends, and the subject of looking one's age came up. The whole group averred that they did not, themselves, look their age. The acquaintance, who was and is extremely bright and amusing but not always equally tactful, became impatient with the implications of this. "That's crazy!" she said. "Somebody has to look their age! You!" she said, pointing at one friend. "You look your age!" But she might as well have pointed at all of us. Strive to be vibrant, by all means. But except for a very lucky few, your age is pretty much your age, and magazine articles fishing for overoptimistic readers by claiming otherwise won't change it. Wish it did, but no.
In Specific: The opposite of the phrase "in general" is "in particular." You hear "in specific" fairly often—I just read it in something by the best living journalist on the planet (that would be James Fallows). But saying things like "Wombats in general, and this wombat in specific," always sounds to me like a clinker in a piano piece. "This wombat in particular" just sounds better.
Food Faux Pas: Why is it that people drinking wine at a social occasion are always described as "sipping" it? The term gets overused and sounds a little precious, like they're butterflies gathering nectar. All sorts of people drink wine, and not always in a decorous manner, so if the occasion was ritzy, there just have to be other ways to get that idea across. At least let the attendees actually drink the wine, occasionally, or just hold the glasses in their hands if they feel like it. They can't spend the whole evening sipping. The same for "munching" hors d'oeuvres. They're human beings, not rodents. Munching implies continuous and often audible jaw motion. If you're blasting through a piece of writing and not thinking hard about it, you might feel it adds a touch of breeziness to say "munching," but it's been worn out for decades now and breeziness is overrated. Last and least: "veggies." I have many dear friends who use this term, but it always sounded like baby talk to me and I can't be the only person who feels that way. Why? Why why why? Why say veggies? How does that make life better? Let us put away childish things and not say "veggies."
Enter: As a way to introduce a new, situation-changing element in a story, this has one advantage—brevity—and a whole bunch of drawbacks. "Waterloo Falls had always been a sleepy Midwestern town." (Add two or three proofs of its sleepiness.) Then the next paragraph begins like this: "Enter Franz McGillicuddy." This is a breezy and kind of lazy way to say that Franz is going to shake the town up. But it interrupts the flow of the story—it makes us about a million times too aware of the writer's stage-managing the events in the piece, since it literally is a stage direction. If you're not writing a play, I think it's best that things not enter that way. Let Franz show up in town in some normal manner.
The Kind of Small-Town America That Doesn't Exist Any More: Speaking of so-called "sleepy" towns, I've read this confident assertion many times over the years, and once is too many. Yeah yeah yeah, postwar demographic trends, all that. But as it stands, the statement is a bit sweeping. It gives the impression to people who mostly live in cities and their suburbs that all of the nation's smaller communities are abandoned, shutters banging, doors hanging off hinges and such like those ghost towns in the California gold country. I assure you, Urban Writer People, that small towns still exist. I live in one, and so do people of all ages including those of the young persuasion. I've been to about a million others. I have a friend who actually moved, Urban Writer People, from suburban Philadelphia to a town in Montana called Hamilton. Hamilton literally has one stoplight. There's a trout river right there, and mountains in the windows. It's peaceful, if chilly in the winter. My friend likes it there a lot. He's a jazz-guitar-playing science dude, by the way, just to swirl a swizzle stick in your stereotypes for you. There's a small division of GlaxoSmithKline near Hamilton, and a job opened up and he jumped at it. At any rate, when someone says small-town America doesn't exist any more, I turn the page and find somebody to read who gives evidence of getting out of the city now and then and getting the facts. There are kajillions of small towns still in this country, and the reports of their nonexistence have been greatly exaggerated.
Well! That'll do for today. Until next time, strive to your utmost to write good and so will I.
On Steroids: This was really kind of tired the first time it was used to mean something that looks like something else but bigger. There are so many ways to say that one thing is bigger than another. Do we really need to keep flogging this particular phrase?
The New Black: This is, or was, a trendy way to say "trendy." I suggest saving the keystrokes and just saying "trendy."
X is the new X-10 You've heard this one—fifty is the new forty, and so on. But nothing has changed, it's pretty much the way it's always been—some people age very gracefully, others hit a wall early, and the rest of us tend to look, and act, our age. An acquaintance of mine was sitting around once with friends, and the subject of looking one's age came up. The whole group averred that they did not, themselves, look their age. The acquaintance, who was and is extremely bright and amusing but not always equally tactful, became impatient with the implications of this. "That's crazy!" she said. "Somebody has to look their age! You!" she said, pointing at one friend. "You look your age!" But she might as well have pointed at all of us. Strive to be vibrant, by all means. But except for a very lucky few, your age is pretty much your age, and magazine articles fishing for overoptimistic readers by claiming otherwise won't change it. Wish it did, but no.
In Specific: The opposite of the phrase "in general" is "in particular." You hear "in specific" fairly often—I just read it in something by the best living journalist on the planet (that would be James Fallows). But saying things like "Wombats in general, and this wombat in specific," always sounds to me like a clinker in a piano piece. "This wombat in particular" just sounds better.
Food Faux Pas: Why is it that people drinking wine at a social occasion are always described as "sipping" it? The term gets overused and sounds a little precious, like they're butterflies gathering nectar. All sorts of people drink wine, and not always in a decorous manner, so if the occasion was ritzy, there just have to be other ways to get that idea across. At least let the attendees actually drink the wine, occasionally, or just hold the glasses in their hands if they feel like it. They can't spend the whole evening sipping. The same for "munching" hors d'oeuvres. They're human beings, not rodents. Munching implies continuous and often audible jaw motion. If you're blasting through a piece of writing and not thinking hard about it, you might feel it adds a touch of breeziness to say "munching," but it's been worn out for decades now and breeziness is overrated. Last and least: "veggies." I have many dear friends who use this term, but it always sounded like baby talk to me and I can't be the only person who feels that way. Why? Why why why? Why say veggies? How does that make life better? Let us put away childish things and not say "veggies."
Enter: As a way to introduce a new, situation-changing element in a story, this has one advantage—brevity—and a whole bunch of drawbacks. "Waterloo Falls had always been a sleepy Midwestern town." (Add two or three proofs of its sleepiness.) Then the next paragraph begins like this: "Enter Franz McGillicuddy." This is a breezy and kind of lazy way to say that Franz is going to shake the town up. But it interrupts the flow of the story—it makes us about a million times too aware of the writer's stage-managing the events in the piece, since it literally is a stage direction. If you're not writing a play, I think it's best that things not enter that way. Let Franz show up in town in some normal manner.
The Kind of Small-Town America That Doesn't Exist Any More: Speaking of so-called "sleepy" towns, I've read this confident assertion many times over the years, and once is too many. Yeah yeah yeah, postwar demographic trends, all that. But as it stands, the statement is a bit sweeping. It gives the impression to people who mostly live in cities and their suburbs that all of the nation's smaller communities are abandoned, shutters banging, doors hanging off hinges and such like those ghost towns in the California gold country. I assure you, Urban Writer People, that small towns still exist. I live in one, and so do people of all ages including those of the young persuasion. I've been to about a million others. I have a friend who actually moved, Urban Writer People, from suburban Philadelphia to a town in Montana called Hamilton. Hamilton literally has one stoplight. There's a trout river right there, and mountains in the windows. It's peaceful, if chilly in the winter. My friend likes it there a lot. He's a jazz-guitar-playing science dude, by the way, just to swirl a swizzle stick in your stereotypes for you. There's a small division of GlaxoSmithKline near Hamilton, and a job opened up and he jumped at it. At any rate, when someone says small-town America doesn't exist any more, I turn the page and find somebody to read who gives evidence of getting out of the city now and then and getting the facts. There are kajillions of small towns still in this country, and the reports of their nonexistence have been greatly exaggerated.
Well! That'll do for today. Until next time, strive to your utmost to write good and so will I.
A couple of pet peeves regarding word usage I'd like to mention. (Claps hands like coach.) Come on, now people, let's get this right!
Misnomer: It's a name that's wrong, not something wrong in itself. Nine times out of ten, when people say misnomer they mean misconception, and that's what they ought to say.
Quash: It's an awfully nice and useful word that means to suppress or extinguish. You don't squash a rumor; you quash a rumor. You squash a grape. Please—let's not say squash when we mean quash.
Misnomer: It's a name that's wrong, not something wrong in itself. Nine times out of ten, when people say misnomer they mean misconception, and that's what they ought to say.
Quash: It's an awfully nice and useful word that means to suppress or extinguish. You don't squash a rumor; you quash a rumor. You squash a grape. Please—let's not say squash when we mean quash.
One of the founders of what was once called New Journalism popped up in the Times today, and yeesh, it's amazing how dated the writing of one Thomas Kennerly Wolfe has come to sound. Tom Wolfe was one of the biggest names in writing years ago, and one of the things he's best known for is The Right Stuff, a look back at the Mercury space program. So of course they wheeled him out to say something about the anniversary of the moon landing, and he did so in his patented style, which suddenly strikes me as inflexible, insufferably self-indulgent, and as absurdly dated as a paisley ascot.
He had a reasonable point to make—in the long run, humans need to establish themselves in space, and a manned mission to Mars is the obvious next step in that, but nobody ever made the case strongly enough. Okay, coulda been a pretty good opinion piece. But no, Mr. Wolfe being himself, he has to natter on like Grandpa Simpson, and the style that seemed so refreshing in 1962 is just sad and annoying now. He mentions that John Glenn was regarded as a hero after his return from space, that he was given a parade in New York City, and that during this parade people didn't just cheer, they cried, police officers among them. Fair enough. But here's how he puts it:
He had a reasonable point to make—in the long run, humans need to establish themselves in space, and a manned mission to Mars is the obvious next step in that, but nobody ever made the case strongly enough. Okay, coulda been a pretty good opinion piece. But no, Mr. Wolfe being himself, he has to natter on like Grandpa Simpson, and the style that seemed so refreshing in 1962 is just sad and annoying now. He mentions that John Glenn was regarded as a hero after his return from space, that he was given a parade in New York City, and that during this parade people didn't just cheer, they cried, police officers among them. Fair enough. But here's how he puts it:
During his ticker-tape parade up Broadway, you have never heard such cheers or seen so many thousands of people crying. Big Irish cops, the classic New York breed, were out in the intersections in front of the world, sobbing, blubbering, boo-hoo-ing, with tears streaming down their faces.At some point between the beginning of the word "sobbing" and the end of the word "boo-hoo-ing," I decided that this was the journalistic equivalent of the '70s live-concert album staple—the drum solo that lasts 11 minutes or so. It only works if the audience has smoked a bunch of weed. And it also came home to me that there are two things you can say about Wolfe's style. One is that nearly a half-century ago he brought a new, distinctive voice to journalism and nonfiction, a voice that used rhythms and colors in arresting and often very effective ways. But Tom Wolfe is way too much in love with the sound of that voice. Good writing is concise. And it calls attention to its subject, not itself. Writers who remember this—Mark Twain comes to mind, and Jane Austen, and Sappho, while we're at it—are read decades, centuries, and milliennia after their deaths. "Eschew surplusage," Twain once said. Well, while Mr. Wolfe seems to still be alive, I've been eschewing his work for a while now, and I'm starting to understand why.
First of all, I generally don't make political comments on this site, although at times, man, I'd love to. And this next isn't political, it's about the use of language and preserving useful distinctions. So I'd like to say something about Sarah Palin's spokesperson du jour Meghan Stapleton and her assertion the other day about Palin's post-resignation future, "The world is literally her oyster."
Now, language evolves and all, and I'm well aware that "literally" has become an intensifier in informal speech. People say about some startling news, "I literally thew up," or "I literally died." Except here's the thing: Used properly, "literally" explicitly refers to things in their literal, real, concrete, non-metaphorical senses. If you literally threw up, then your stomach contents were somewhere other than your stomach, and if you literally died, then you are no more, you have ceased to be, you have expired and gone to meet your maker, joined the bleedin' choir invisible and so forth.
And sometimes I wish that were true of people who misuse the term "literally." To say "The world is literally her oyster" is to assert that the world is, in actual fact, an oyster, and that it belongs to or is under the control of Sarah Palin. Certainly there are lots of credulous and imaginative people around and it's possible Ms. Stapleton believes that the world is, in actual fact, an oyster in the possession of Gov. Palin, and if so, she used the term properly and I excuse her from any chastisement on this score. But if she thinks that the world is a different thing from an oyster, she used the term incorrectly and someone in her business should know better. Just sayin.' Life is confusing enough; let's not muddy things further, eh, Ms. Stapleton? Thanks!
Now, language evolves and all, and I'm well aware that "literally" has become an intensifier in informal speech. People say about some startling news, "I literally thew up," or "I literally died." Except here's the thing: Used properly, "literally" explicitly refers to things in their literal, real, concrete, non-metaphorical senses. If you literally threw up, then your stomach contents were somewhere other than your stomach, and if you literally died, then you are no more, you have ceased to be, you have expired and gone to meet your maker, joined the bleedin' choir invisible and so forth.
And sometimes I wish that were true of people who misuse the term "literally." To say "The world is literally her oyster" is to assert that the world is, in actual fact, an oyster, and that it belongs to or is under the control of Sarah Palin. Certainly there are lots of credulous and imaginative people around and it's possible Ms. Stapleton believes that the world is, in actual fact, an oyster in the possession of Gov. Palin, and if so, she used the term properly and I excuse her from any chastisement on this score. But if she thinks that the world is a different thing from an oyster, she used the term incorrectly and someone in her business should know better. Just sayin.' Life is confusing enough; let's not muddy things further, eh, Ms. Stapleton? Thanks!
For all the ex- and soon-to-be ex-journalists like me, a website cheerfully titled Newspaper Death Watch. They do claim that in addition to the death watching they're chronicling the reinvention of journalism.
I suppose there are people who like cold calling—sales-type people, who see it as a game to be won, I imagine—but
I sure don't. I seem to have some company in that—when I mention it, most people make a face, like it's some sort of medical procedure that we all have to get but would prefer not to have to do or even talk about.
And then I thought of a perfect metaphor. My cat has to get subcutaneous fluid injections (I just started to type "objections," which he has) every few days. I remember the first day I did it—I was literally trembling at the end. I had an awful sense of messing about blindly with a creature's body, sticking metal into it and putting fluids under its skin and it just felt blasphemous. I was doing something that wasn't my province, it was for doctors and God and other more competent agents to do.
That was a year and a half ago. Now it's just part of the chores. I don't much like it and I'd just as soon not do it, but I'm not, like, a mess when I'm done. And the thing is, it keeps him alive.
And maybe some bright shining day I'll feel that way about cold calls. They'll put food on the table and thus keep me alive, and it's just part of the work day. Not the funnest part, but not a big scary deal. Maybe some bright shining day I'll feel that way.
But not today. (Sigh.)
I sure don't. I seem to have some company in that—when I mention it, most people make a face, like it's some sort of medical procedure that we all have to get but would prefer not to have to do or even talk about.And then I thought of a perfect metaphor. My cat has to get subcutaneous fluid injections (I just started to type "objections," which he has) every few days. I remember the first day I did it—I was literally trembling at the end. I had an awful sense of messing about blindly with a creature's body, sticking metal into it and putting fluids under its skin and it just felt blasphemous. I was doing something that wasn't my province, it was for doctors and God and other more competent agents to do.
That was a year and a half ago. Now it's just part of the chores. I don't much like it and I'd just as soon not do it, but I'm not, like, a mess when I'm done. And the thing is, it keeps him alive.
And maybe some bright shining day I'll feel that way about cold calls. They'll put food on the table and thus keep me alive, and it's just part of the work day. Not the funnest part, but not a big scary deal. Maybe some bright shining day I'll feel that way.
But not today. (Sigh.)
