On October 11, editor and blogger Mike Pope tweeted this photo of an ad for an in-store Starbucks in a Seattle supermarket.
“YES, PSLEASE.” Photo by Sabrina
As the small print clarifies, the PSL in PSLEASE refers to Pumpkin Spice Latte, the nigh-ubiquitous autumn beverage, and not, say, to Process Specification Language, Personal Seat License, Philadelphia Sports Leagues, Phoenix Senior Living*, or the Romanian semiautomatic rifle.
Responses to the tweet fell into four categories:
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The video depicts a mass shooting in a church by a lone assassin who looks very much like the grinning 45th president of the United States. It is violent, gruesome, tasteless, and obviously faked, but the adjective the New York Times editors chose for the headline above Monday’s story was none of those words. It was, instead, macabre, a word with a long, lurid, and murky history.
The organizer of the American Priority event at which the video was screened said the video was part of a “meme exhibit.”
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Long-time listener here, but I’m the first to admit to some gaps in my knowledge of radio history. Oh, sure, I knew that US radio and TV call letters begin with “W” for stations east of the Mississippi and “K” for stations west of the Mississippi*, and that Canadian stations’ call signs begin with “C.” I recognized many call letters as representing the networks that owned or operated them: KABC, WCBS, KPBS. I knew that the call signs of many public-radio stations include the initials of the colleges and universities that house their studios: KFJC (Foothill Junior College), KCSM (College of San Mateo), KPCC (Pasadena City College), WBUR (Boston University Radio). And I appreciated the Bay Area references in many local stations’ call letters: KABL, KFOG, KOIT (for Coit Tower, one of the city’s quirkier landmarks).
I also knew one call sign whose initials stood for a phrase: Chicago’s WGN, for “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” aka the Chicago Tribune. But it wasn’t until I started watching Ken Burns’s excellent eight-episode Country Music on PBS (that’s Public Broadcasting System, in case you didn’t already know) that I learned how many other early call signals—though randomly assigned—took on extra character as initialisms for slogans and phrases used as commercial gimmicks or mnemonics.
Undated ad for WSM, which began broadcasting from Nashville on October 5, 1925.
Continue reading "Hidden messages in broadcast call letters" »
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You know what an apostrophe is. It’s the little squiggle above the baseline in don’t and it’s that substitutes for a missing letter (o and i, respectively). Or it’s the little squiggle that denotes possession, because there is in fact a missing letter in those words: In Chaucer’s time, genitives (the linguistic term for what we casually call possessives) were formed by inserting an e before the s (the doges bone). We get apostrophe from Greek, with stops in Latin and French; the original form means “avert, turn away,” which is why we also use apostrophe for the rhetorical device of “turning away” to briefly address some person or thing—as one often does, say, on Twitter.
And speaking of Twitter, here’s what an apostrophe is not: It’s not a hyphen.
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“Texting is not destroying the language” and five other things you may not understand about English. (John McIntyre for the Baltimore Sun)
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A study of 597 logos found that “descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance.” (Harvard Business Review)
Old descriptive logos (left) vs. new nondescriptive logos (right).
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