Fritinancy

Words on Screens

"Communication is the transfer of emotion," writes Seth Godin in "Really Bad Powerpoint."

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.) If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.

Seth lays down the law: No more than six words per presentation slide. No cheesy images. No sound effects that came with the program (rip and burn your own, he says). And no bullets ever.

This is Seth Godin talking, the bald, oracular marketing guru who commands huge speaking fees (I've attended one of his presentations; Seth does Really Good PowerPoint) and is quoted fawningly all over the blogosphere. When Seth talks, business leaders snap to attention and salute. But will a lecture from Seth change their pathetic PowerPointing habits? Not a damn chance. They're too scared, too ovine, too unimaginative. And too unlikely to team up with the very people who might save their reputations: writers and designers.

Here's an example of how PowerPoint might be done brilliantly. VidLit isn't strictly a presentation format; it's a book-marketing medium. Company founder Liz Dubelman spent ten years in film and television production and got the idea for VidLit while listening to This American Life, the National Public Radio program that's been described as "like movies for radio." VidLit is like music videos for books. Dubelman and her crew record authors reading snippets of their work and add original music and Flash animation to create, in Dubelman's deadpan words, "a compelling new form of entertainment." Her first creation was her own short-short story, Craziest, about her Scrabble obsession. She became briefly famous when a VidLit (or YidLit) for Yiddish with Dick and Jane attracted so much attention that she and the book's publisher were sued by the publisher of the original Dick and Jane books. Nothing like a lawsuit to fire up the fame engines. Now playing on the VidLit site are clever little teasers for The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit, by Lois Beckwith; Don't Get Too Comfortable, by "This American Life" regular David Rakoff; and--my current favorite--Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace. And many, many others.

So what can corporate presenters learn from VidLit? Plenty. Notice how the images in a VidLit don't politely mirror the words being spoken. They play peekaboo with the words, tweak their noses, run circles around them. Notice how the soundtrack creates an instant "going-to-the-movies" vibe. (Hey, this isn't a meeting--it's entertainment!) Notice how the narrators never say "um," or "let's see if this thing is working." And notice how you feel after you've watched a VidLit. Yep. It's a "transfer of emotion."

That's communication.

Apostrophe Apoplexy

I try, I really do, to forgive apostrophic malefactors--the flagrant inserters of the grocer's apostrophe, the dumb bunnies who think "his and her's" looks perfectly fine. Elsewhere in the blogosphere, though, Bob the Angry Flower isn't having any of it, no sir. He's mad as hell. And really funny, too.

And the Award-Acceptance Award Goes to...

There's nothing like hearing your favorite film or television actor attempt to improvise an award-acceptance speech to make you appreciate the scriptwriter's art. On screen, all actors are stunningly articulate (except when they're charmingly inarticulate); on the awards podium, nearly all of them are boring, banal, and repetitive. (Exceptions: Meryl Streep and most traditionally schooled British actors.) This year, writes Caryn James in today's New York Times, the problem is even more ... well, dramatic: in the three awards shows televised so far this season, the same four actors have won in their respective acting categories and have given more or less the same bad acceptance speech every time. James writes:

As the awards season lumbers toward the Oscars, you can almost envision what might happen when the Academy Awards are finally given out on Feb. 25. Forest Whitaker will fumble for words and mumble; Eddie Murphy will robotically deliver his list of industry thanks; Jennifer Hudson will work in a hokey use of the word “dream”; and Helen Mirren will pay tribute to the actual queen.

Whoa! Cut! If you've ever thought, "I could write a better acceptance speech than that," here's your opportunity. Enter National Public Radio's first Oscar Speech contest and show 'em how it ought to be done. The rules are simple: Write a 200-word speech in character (and in good taste) for any of the nominees for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, or Best Supporting Actress. Deadline: 11:59 p.m. PST, February 17, 2007. As is the quaint custom in public-radio land, there will be no prizes, but the winners (as judged by NPR's digital media staff) will record their speeches over the phone; the best ones will be posted online. Here's a sample to get you motivated; the speaker (as if you needed to be told), is Sacha Baron Cohen in character as Borat:

Jagshemash! Wa wa oi oi. I kiss all of you. Especially you. (Points to sister.) She is No. 3 prostitute in all of Kazakhstan? Only four people in Kazakhstan watch ceremony right now, and 18 stand on top of roof with foil taped to groin to get signal. But this is glorious day for people of Kazakhstan. Only two from my country does America honor in this respect — I, Borat, and the how-you-say audio engineer from the 1987 silent film "Kazakh Potassium Company Employee Training Guide Part Eleven."

French Words of the Week

Away With Words readers, along with people who reach my telephone voicemail, know that every Monday I feature a word of the week. I recently became acquainted with a French-language version of this service. On his Another American in France blog, WCS posts a new word every Wednesday (in English, heureusement, and charmingly illustrated). WCS has lived in the Loire Valley since 2003 and says he learns much of his vocabulary from French television. Here's what he learned about péplum:

A quick browse through our French tv guide in any given week will point up many films referred to as péplums. These are movies like Gladiator, Ben Hur, Spartacus, King of Kings, or one of the many Cleopatra films. What do they have in common? They are all epic stories set in antiquity, usually Greek or Roman, and often in biblical times.

The word péplum, in fact, originates from the greek peplon and the latin peplum, meaning tunic. It's oldest meaning is for a woman's sleeveless garment, attached at the shoulder. Think "toga."

These days, péplum is the French word for a style of epic movie set in ancient Greek or Roman times. Let the chariot races begin!

Word of the Week: Yoctosecond

Yoctosecond: The smallest measurable unit of time (so far): a trillionth of a trillionth of a second (10^-24 second). It takes a quark particle a little more than a yoctosecond to circle the proton of an atomic nucleus. "Yocto-" is an alteration of "octo-" ("eighth"--from "the eighth power of a thousandth"). For more on time scales large and small, see Natalie Angier's Science Times article in last week's New York Times, Making Sense of Time, Earthbound and Otherwise.

Thanks--I'll Walk

You already know, don't you, that shoe designers bestow names on each of their creations? Sometimes the name is historical, like the Ferragamo Audrey, named for fashion muse Audrey Hepburn. Sometimes it's geographical: Donald J Pliner named this skimmer "Haifa," and who's to say he shouldn't? Sometimes the name is whimsical, as with most of Stuart Weitzman's styles: say Beltitout slowly.

But when it came time for the naming gnomes at the shoe manufacturer Elle to dub the shoe pictured here--a driving moccasin, it's important to note--they abandoned all precedent. And common sense. For reasons best known to them and their caseworkers, they chose to call the style "Nervous."

Both hands on the steering wheel, please.

Via Sierra Trading Post.

Characters

There's a naming agency in Los Angeles, Scarcliff Salvador, that lists among its services character naming for movies and television. When I discovered this (via the agency's interesting blog, Cultural Branding), I was stricken with childish, foot-stamping envy. Why isn't anyone paying me to name characters, I whined to the walls. It sounds like the most fun anyone could possibly have with an encyclopedia and a baby-naming book!

Alas, I'm not in Tinseltown and my chances of landing this dream gig appear remote. But as luck would have it, I've recently seen three movies that seem to exhibit greater-than-usual care with character names. If I can't join 'em, I can at least talk about 'em.

Breaking and Entering, written and directed by Anthony Minghella, is a complicated love triangle set in London, where immigrants and exiles intersect with several species of unhappy Brits. The principal characters' names seem to be drawn from an ironic medieval allegory. Will (Jude Law), Liv ("live," played by Robin Wright Penn), and Bea ("be"; Poppy Rogers) form the unhappy British family: Will is spineless, Liv is cold, and Bea is autistic. A spirited Romanian prostitute (Vera Farmiga) is named Oana ("wanna"); when Will meets Want...well, no spoilers here. There are also a Bosnian mother (Juliette Binoche) and son (Rafi Gavron), whose names mirror each other, and even sound like "mirror": Amira and Miro. One more naming irony: the neighborhood in which the movie takes place is King's Cross--ironic because the area can only optimistically be called "gentrifying," although it's undeniably a crossroads. The film's title also has multiple interpretations: criminal, psychological, sexual. You can enjoy the movie without thinking about all this; for one thing, there are some terrific parkour sequences. And maybe that's the best option: so much naming symbolism tends to weigh down a plot, especially one as complex as this one.

Children of Men, written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is a marvelous adaptation of P.D. James's dystopian novel, set in a near future in which no babies are being born. Amid the universal grief and violence, a miraculously pregnant woman emerges. When we learn that her name is Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), we get it: she's the key to the future of humanity. Her reluctant protector is Theo (Clive Owen)--Greek for "god." (And behold, the movie opened in the U.S. on Christmas Day.) There's a Luke and a Miriam, too, but no other overtly religious signals in the character names. And just as well, because to dwell on the names would distract from the power of this movie, with its stunning cinematography and deeply moving storyline.

Pan's Labyrinth (El Labirinto del Fauno in Europe), written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, is a beautiful and brutal fairy tale set in 1944 Spain, in the aftermath of the civil war. When you have a young protagonist named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) you have echoes of Hamlet: is she innocent or malign, dreaming or lucid, heroine or victim? Ofelia's mother, Carmen--a stereotypically Spanish name--is pregnant and tyrannized by her cruel new husband, just as Spain itself was subjugated by Franco's fascists. To survive, Ofelia turns to fantasy and also to a tough yet tender housekeeper, Mercedes ("mercies"), played by Maribel Verdú. Tellingly, the monstrous stepfather has no first name at all: he is simply "Captain Vidal."

I can't resist adding a few more words about Pan's Labyrinth that have nothing to do with the characters' names, interesting though they are. It's the most astonishing film I've seen in a season of excellent films (the aforementioned Children of Men, The Departed, Babel). The extraordinarily rewarding narrative uses violence in the most meaningful, primal way, the way it's used in myth and Grimm's fairy tales. The fantasy sequences are shocking and original and profoundly creepy...yet also humane and beautiful. And the music, by Julian Navarrete, is flat-out gorgeous. (Listen to it--especially the heartbreaking, wordless lullaby in waltz tempo--and buy the CD, here.) Director del Toro was interviewed yesterday by Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air"; he's one of the most thoughtful, articulate, and literate directors working today, and the interview is full of fascinating revelations. Del Toro's interpretation of the Frankenstein monster as a metaphor for adolescence was especially insightful.

And speaking of Frankenstein and fantasy and Spain, I recommend that you find a rental copy of director Victor Erice's El Espíritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), the story of another young Spanish girl's fantasy life--in this case, inspired by her viewing of the Boris Karloff Frankenstein. It too is set in civil war-era Spain, but because it was filmed in 1973, while Franco was still alive, it had to be much more indirect than Pan's Labyrinth. It almost certainly influenced Guillermo del Toro, and it makes a perfect companion to his own modern masterpiece.

No Strings Attached

In his latest "ad report card," Slate critic Seth Stevenson manfully takes on Playtex's new campaign for a tampon it's calling "Playtex Sport." (The tagline--honestly!--is "May the best protection win.") I haven't yet seen the spot, but I enjoyed Seth's description of "several crotch-centric shots, including a gymnast with legs splayed wildly and a snowboarder in a strained, midair squat." Yes, that's what we gals like to do, any time of the month!

I have to take issue, though, with Seth's argument that the campaign represents a bold new direction in tampon advertising, away from fearmongering (will I leak? will he notice?) and toward a more athletic image.

Unlike Seth, who is venturing into terra incognita here, I have some intimate knowledge (so to speak) of the subject--and not only because ain't I a woman? Many years ago I researched and wrote a book about tampons (it's waaay out of print, but immortalized in Straight Dope, which misspells my name only once). [Update: The misspelling has been fixed!] I was the first journalist allowed to tour the Tampax factory (then in Palmer, Massachusetts), and I may have been the first person to have had a tampon museum in her basement (tragically lost, or rather absorbed, in the Great Berkeley Flood of 1985). I also studied the rich lore of tampon marketing, which brings me to the subject at hand.

The "feminine protection"-sport connection is actually quite venerable, dating back at least to the 1960s. The marvelous online Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health (MUM.org; my name is misspelled there, too) reproduces a 1982 Stayfree pad ad featuring gymnast Cathy Rigby; a few years later, Mary Lou Retton hawked "petal soft" Tampax. (Only Rigby is depicted in crotch-centric action.) Tampon manufacturers, eager to deflect attention from their product's bizarre reputation as a deflowerer of virgins (a myth fomented largely by the Catholic Church), often touted "active lifestyle" as their product's main benefit.

Tampon package graphics drove home the sporting message--and inspired the following ancient joke, which I've copied from the MUM site:

Three boys are sitting on the stoop on a summer's afternoon. One of their fathers, exasperated that the kids are just sitting around, gives them five bucks and tells them to go amuse themselves. As they walk down Main Street they debate what they should do with the money. Should they buy a deck of cards? A football? Play in the arcade? "Wait a sec!" says one of the boys as he runs into the drug store. "Wait here!" A few minutes later he comes out with a package of tampons. "You idiot!" his friends shout. "We were going to have some fun. What are we going to do with those?" 

"Look what it says right here on the box," the boy replies: "You can go horseback riding, you can go swimming..."

(Yes, that's carefree girl Cheryl Tiegs up in the left-hand corner, in an early-1970s ad for Carefree tampons. Hat tip to Museum of Menstruation.)

Laughing All the Way to the Bank

After reading my post about TomatoBank, the enterprising Anantha at Brandnama did some research into other unusual bank names. His list includes several Indian banks (Yes Bank, Ram Ram Bank, Lord Krishna Bank); he also jogged my memory about New York's Apple Bank, a name that seems less strange when you know NYC's nickname, The Big Apple. (The tagline "We're Good for You," wants us to make the orchard association, but Barry Popik's definitive NYC site concludes otherwise. The bank was originally called Harlem Savings Bank; it changed its name in 1983 after an acquisition.) By the way, doesn't that Apple Bank logo look suspiciously like TomatoBank's?

Another U.S. institution on Anantha's list, Cincinnati's Fifth Third Bank, is a longstanding joke among name developers. Yes, it resulted from a merger between Fifth National Bank and Third National Bank, but as Marty Neumeier points out in his zingy name critique (scroll down), naming a bank after an ordinal number is boring, bland, and meaningless. Two ordinals are just plain nuts. Fifth Third has been in the news lately because--ta-da!--it "plans to redefine itself," according to a Jan. 17 press release. Starting with a name change, perhaps? No such luck.

"It is becoming a different bank on the inside. The way we interact with customers, the products that we sell them, the way that we service the customers becomes different because we want to connect differently,'' said Michelle Van Dyke, the Grand Rapids-based CEO for Fifth Third in Michigan.

And another spokeswoman said, "The branding is less about a new look and more about a new feel." Uh-huh. The only thing I want to "feel" at my bank (which, for the record, is not Fifth Third, or First Second, or Forty-Leventh) is the texture of crisp banknotes.

The Best Writing I've Read in a Long Time

I'm not particularly interested in youth soccer, have no connections with the Atlanta area, and am usually pretty skeptical about "feel-good" stories. But I was powerfully moved by "Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field," which appeared on Page 1 of yesterday's New York Times. It wasn't only the subject matter, although that could have sufficed: the story tells of the Fugees (short for refugees), a boys' soccer team that plays against staggering odds in Clarkston, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. All the team members have fled some of the world's scariest places (Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan) and were placed by resettlement agencies in this town of 7,100. "Some have endured unimaginable hardship to get here: squalor in refugee camps, separation from siblings and parents," reporter Warren St. John tells us. "One saw his father killed in their home."

The boys are lucky: their coach is an extraordinarily compassionate and dedicated woman who is herself an immigrant: Lula Mufleh grew up in Jordan and graduated from Smith College in the U.S. They are also unlucky: many people in Clarkston, including the town's mayor, feel threatened by the refugees and have decided to ban soccer from the town park, the only place the Fugees can afford to play.

It's a terrific story. But the best thing about it is what it isn't. It isn't melodramatic. It isn't florid. Most importantly, it isn't about Warren St. John. Unlike too many newspaper journalists these days, St. John stays quietly in the background and lets the story tell itself.

This is harder to do than it seems. It's much easier to stack the decks and turn the boy refugees into Dickensian heroes and the town officials into ogres. And it's tempting to turn a long feature like this one into a showcase for one's own writing skills. St. John resists both pitfalls. He chooses his words carefully: he doesn't use needless synonyms for "he said," and he picks his adjectives with exquisite care. He alternates adroitly among descriptive passages, quotations, and tense play-by-play--very different styles of writing, yet here part of a seamless whole. He makes connections subtly, never allowing the reader to feel manipulated.

As I said, not easy.

Take a look at this excerpt and see whether you agree. Then read the whole story now--this week--before the Times charges you a fee to see it.

After being ejected from a game against the Fugees in November, a rival player made an obscene gesture to nearly every player on the Fugees before heading to his bench. And opponents sometimes mocked the Fugees when they spoke to each other in Swahili, or when Ms. Mufleh shouted instructions in Arabic.

There were even incidents involving referees. Two linesmen were reprimanded by a head referee during a pregame lineup in October for snickering when the name Mohammed Mohammed was called.

Ms. Mufleh tells her players to try their best to ignore these slights. When the other side loses its cool, she tells them, it is a sign of weakness.

Ms. Mufleh is just as fatalistic about bad calls. In her entire coaching career, she tells her players, she has never seen a call reversed because of arguing.

The Fugees are perhaps better equipped to accept this advice than most. Their lives, after all, have been defined by bad calls. On the field, they seem to have a higher threshold for anger than the American players, who often respond to borderline calls as if they are catastrophic injustices. Bad calls, Ms. Mufleh teaches her players, are part of the game. You have to accept them, and move on.