Fritinancy

May Linkfest

Lots o' links this month, so make yourself comfortable.

Haikuvies: Tell a movie's plot/In seventeen syllables/Spoilers? Sure--why not? (Actually, you get 17 times seven.)

It took about 24 hours for a meme called When Obama Wins to make the leap from Twitter to the whole wide web. Gather round, children, and hear Andrew Crow of Adaptive Path tell the origin story:

I'm never sure about how internet memes start, but this one started with a typo.

Dan was twittering something about Alabama, but wrote "Alambama". He joked that when Barack Obama wins the election, certain states will probably be renamed Alobama, Califobama, Nevama, Massabama, New Yobama. Of course, I thought that was hilarious and started thinking about other things that would change once Obama wins. So, a few of us started twittering silly little things, thinking of it as an inside joke.

Overnight, a few people caught on giving it a life of its own.

Jason Kottke took this and mashed it up to create this really cool microsite.

I think what interests me the most about these is how fast they spread. It's been less than 24 hours and there are already over 500 tweets about it. Certainly taken on a life of it's own.

Which is the perfect segue to my favorite WOW so far: "When Obama wins ... everyone will know the difference between its and it's." (By 111archeravenue.)

I considered saving this for Halloween, but death is always in season at Fatal Utterances, "a glossary of slang, jargon, euphemism, and cant as used by undertakers, criminals, consumer activists, and the ordinary people." Some favorite entries: bier baron (a funeral-parlor owner), Mrs. Z (a corpse), and Stare Number 12 ("the look that passes over a man's face as he regards another man as a meal").

The idea behind Brand Tags is that a brand is whatever people say it is. Go there and give your one-word impressions of brands like Gap, Starbucks, Yahoo, Greenpeace, Whole Foods, and many more. (It's all over Twitter now, but I heard it first from Rowland Hobbs, whose tags I follow on Del.icio.us.)

The Big Word Project is selling words at $1 a letter. "Search for your word and link it to your website. Your website is then the new definition." Started by a couple of graduate students in Northern Ireland.

You probably know about Stuff White People Like, which reportedly is being turned into a book. (What do white people like? Coffee, Asian girls, Ivy League schools--stuff like that.) Now Andrew Hammel, an American in Germany, offers Stuff White Germans Like: #3 Balkan disco music, #5 custom-designed bookshelves, #11 Paul Auster. (Really? Paul Auster?)

Roy Peter Clark is serializing his next book, The Glamour of Grammar, on his Poynter Online blog (Poynter's slogan: "Everything You Need to Be a Better Journalist"). He's inviting readers to make suggestions and correct errors. His goal is to present "not a comprehensive grammar, but an essential grammar: those elements of language that the reader and writer can use today and every day." Even if you groan at the mention of grammar, read this series: it's lively and engaging and wildly informative. (Yes, glamour of grammar. You knew the two words were related, didn't you? Roy explains in his first installment.)

Mike Pope on the seven stages of being edited:

3) Anger

I'm starting to get irritated. What the -- ? That's a stupid edit. And so's that one. Ha! That's just wrong! Smartypants editors, think they know everything! Well, let me just set that editor straight ...

And speaking of anger, here's the Baltimore Sun's John McIntyre on "Those Damn Copy Editors," in which he addresses the complaint of "someone named Seth Godin"¹ that a copy editor "totally wrecked" his work:

Unfortunately, Mr. Godin does not supply a single instance of the copy editor's destructiveness, so it is up for discussion whether he is an injured author or a fulminating boor. (The other texts at his blog do not suggest that revision of his prose would be a cultural catastrophe.)

Catching his breath, McIntyre offers some very sensible suggestions for improving relations between writers and copy editors.

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¹ Guru Supremo of hip marketing manifestos and, according to one of McIntyre's commenters, "author of the most popular ebook ever."

Nau Is the New Then

Eco-sportswear "concept" Nau issues a going-out-of-business manifesto:

In the current highly risk-averse capital market, we simply could not raise the necessary funds to continue to move forward. We believe this is not so much a reflection of the viability of our business, but the result of an unfortunate confluence of events. Just as we could not have predicted the sudden groundswell of environmental consciousness that blossomed at the time we launched our business, we did not foresee the current crisis in the capital markets. At this time, investors are loath to invest in anything; especially, it appears, a company like Nau that has the audacity to challenge conventional paradigms of what a business could be.

And much, much more in this vein.

I never cared for Nau's clothing--too somber and space-agey--but I do regret the passing of a company that knew the correct spelling of loath (adjective).

Everything on the site is half-price.

(According to a Cool Hunting report from upbeat pre-launch days--about 20 months ago--"Nau" means "welcome" in Maori.)

Via Wardrobe 911.

The New Old Thing

Brim coffee, Salon Solutions hair products, Eagle snack foods, Nuprin pain reliever: they're gone but not forgotten, writes Rob Walker in "Can a Dead Brand Live Again?" in the May 18 New York Times Sunday magazine. Dropped by their parent companies, some of these "ghost brands" have been acquired by River West Brands, a small Chicago company specializing in "brand reanimation." River West's approach is interesting for two reasons, Walker writes:

One is that for the most part the equity — the idea — is the only thing the company is interested in owning. River West acquires brands when the products themselves are dead, not merely ailing. Aside from Brim, the brands it acquired in the last few years include Underalls, Salon Selectives, Nuprin and the game maker Coleco, among others. “In most cases we’re dealing with a brand that only exists as intellectual property,” says Paul Earle, River West’s founder. “There’s no retail presence, no product, no distribution, no trucks, no plants. Nothing. All that exists is memory. We’re taking consumers’ memories and starting entire businesses.”

The other interesting thing is that when Earle talks about consumer memory, he is factoring in something curious: the faultiness of consumer memory. There is opportunity, he says, not just in what we remember but also in what we misremember.

The best example of a reanimated brand is probably the Volkswagen Beetle, which maintains the name but not the form of the original. (The contemporary design suggests the old version without slavishly imitating it.) "The reintroduced Beetle layered 'nostalgic reassurance' over modern functionality," writes Walker. The nostalgia is front and center in the current ad campaign, which pairs a talking "classic" Beetle (with a comic German accent) with its sleeker, silent update or with contemporary celebrities. (Watch a spot with Herr Beetle and Napster's Sean Fanning here.)

You may be familiar with Walker's writing from the Consumed column in the Times magazine and from his blog, Murketing, which examines brands and anti-brands. I'm looking forward to reading his new book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, which will be released June 3.

Word of the Week: BLAD

BLAD: Publishing-industry term for a short advance version of a book--usually the jacket art and several sample pages--that gives a publicist or distributor the gist of the contents and design. Said to be an acronym of Basic Layout And Design; however, it may be a backronym from blad, Scots dialect for "a section" or "a fragment."

Read more about publishing-industry jargon here.

Talking Politics

In my latest column for Visual Thesaurus, published today, I take a look as some of the lingo that's been coined during the current presidential campaign, such as Bittergate, under the bus, and this:

Shoulder-pad feminists: "Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don't like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism." So wrote Maureen Dowd in a March 5 New York Times op-ed column that went on to define the phrase as symbolizing the "men-are-pigs, woe-is-me, sisters-must-stick-together, pantsuits-are-powerful era that Hillary's campaign has lately revived with a vengeance." The phrase—and the rest of Dowd's column about racism and sexism—struck a tender nerve among many readers. Shoulder pads make an interesting metaphor: out of fashion in women's clothing for more than a decade, they suggest both historic achievement and sartorial not-with-it-ness. The image of broadened shoulders also evokes football-like aggression and unwelcome pushiness. Feminist has also become a highly charged word: for many young women, it seems to carry no positive implications at all (such as equal pay for equal work), but only stridency, man-hating, and—those shoulder pads again—bad fashion choices.

Full access is restricted to subscribers, but a year's subscription is only $19.95 and well worth it, if you ask this biased observer. The new "executive producer" of VT--that's apparently what they call an editor nowadays-- is Ben Zimmer, formerly of Oxford University Press, and he's got some great ideas about VT's future. Read here about how VT enlisted the help of opera singers to record the pronunications of 150,000 words and phrases in VT's lexical database. Ben is also writing a new column, Word Routes, available to nonsubscribers (although you have to subscribe to leave a comment). And his two-part interview with New York Times columnist William Safire, whose revised Safire's Political Dictionary was just published, is full of insights from a long career in words and writing. 

Oh, and don't forget the main attraction: the visual thesaurus itself. Type in a word and watch a constellation of synonyms bloom around your entry, then click on any word in the constellation to generate still more synonyms. Available in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish!