Fritinancy

Death Sentence

Today's e-mail brings an invitation from Cal Performances containing the most complicated sentence I've read in a long while:

Tell us your favorite moments from one of the performances of this true masterpiece of dance our records show you have attended in the past and we'll enter your name in a drawing to win two free tickets to the Friday, May 29th performance.

Forget sentence diagramming: You need a headlamp, a pickax, and a compass to get to the end of that accretion. It's writing by committee:  forty-four words, seven prepositional phrases (beginning with from, of, of, of, in, in, and to), wordiness ("true masterpiece"), and a dizzying swerve in meaning (the hard right turn at "our records show").

No sentence should labor this hard—especially a sentence in a marketing pitch. This one should have been broken into shorter, more easily digestible segments.

Here's how the e-mail begins:

We're asking for your help in our celebration of the 20th Anniversary of one of "the happiest and most endearing works American dance has seen" (San Francisco Chronicle): Mark Morris's L'Allegro il Penseroso ed il Moderato, May 29-31, at Zellerbach Hall.

And here's how I'd rewrite what follows:

Our records show you've attended a previous performance of this dance masterpiece. Tell us what you most enjoyed about it and we'll enter your name in a drawing to win two free tickets to the Friday, May 29, performance.

(Note that it's May 29, not 29th, and that the date must be set off between a pair of commas. In the first paragraph, "anniversary" should be lower case; it would be capitalized only in a title.)

By the way, the e-mail also mis-punctuated the name of Morris's work, which is based on a Handel score of the same title: there's a comma after "L'Allegro."

Handel was, of course, a Baroque composer. Perhaps the baroque sentence in the Cal Performances e-mail was intended as an homage.

New Name Beat: Recology

San Francisco garbage pickup and recycling company Norcal Waste Systems announced today that it has changed its name to Recology. According to BusinessWire, the name change "is rooted in the company’s 89-year heritage as one of the nation’s first urban recyclers. Recology, with clear roots in words like recycling, renewal, reuse and reduction, signals that the company will be leading the evolution of the industry—eliminating waste from the vocabulary of consumer and industry alike."

And as the logo makes evident, "ecology" is also part of the new identity.

Along with the new name, logo, and web site, Recology has a new slogan (or "rallying cry," as the company calls it): "Waste Zero." The company is making its commitment tangible by moving to a new Gold LEED-certified office (50 California St., San Francisco).

The identity change is more than a facelift. The "Norcal" part of the old name is already obsolete: the company's compost operations are in Oregon, and Andrew Ross reports in the San Francisco Chronicle that the company will be expanding beyond California in other ways.

"Waste" is also obsolete, company president and CEO Mike Sangiacomo told BusinessWire: “Our industry is no longer about waste management." The new name "will help move us away from the mentality of disposal to a mandate to use less of what we have and get more from what we use.”

I give the new name and tagline two thumbs up (with an asterisk). Getting rid of "waste" is a wise idea and a clear signal that humans no longer can afford to keep throwing stuff away and ignoring the consequences. "Waste Zero" (which borrows its syntax from similar formulas such as Patient Zero and Inbox Zero) is direct and modern. And calling it a rallying cry casts the motto in a fresh light that's also appropriately recycled: slogan is the simplified spelling of Scottish-Gaelic sluagh-ghairm, which means "army (or battle) cry."

"Recology" is a clever compendium of timely language; the re- prefix has mostly positive associations right now (with the exception of recession), and -ology (knowledge about, science of) makes the company seem smart and savvy.

So why the asterisk? Just this: there will be an irresistible temptation to turn the name into Reek-ology if garbage ever starts piling up on curbs.

That aside, I want to give special credit to whoever rewrote the web site. The site design is minimal—free of waste, you might say—which puts the text in the spotlight. The content is clear and concise; sentences are short yet not cold, mostly because they're written in the first person plural:

First, the reality. We can’t afford to keep throwing away our future. We don’t have the resources and, thanks to global warming, we no longer have the time.

Now the promise. Every day, both traditional and new technologies are making it easier to stop wasting what we have and make more of what we use. In an easily compostable nutshell, this is both the underlying truth and overarching idea behind the name Recology.

"Easily compostable nutshell" is especially endearing.

Nice logo, too (sorry I couldn't grab a bigger one): the blue-green gradient evokes air, earth, and water, and the sprouting capital R suggests the benefits of recycling.

I haven't been able to find out who did the renaming and redesign. If you know, please share the information in a comment.

"Art & Copy"

Yesterday at the San Francisco International Film Festival I saw a terrific new documentary: Art & Copy, about the people behind some of the most influential and inventive advertising campaigns of the last half century. The film, which was commissioned the ad-industry nonprofit One Club, focuses on living members of the Creative Hall of Fame Advertising Hall of Fame, including the profane and combative George Lois, who created many groundbreaking Esquire covers as well as the equally groundbreaking "I Want My MTV" campaign; Phyllis K. Robinson, the copywriter who helped found Doyle Dane Bernbach and who conceived and wrote the "It Lets Me Be Me" campaign for Clairol; and Hal Riney, the creator and voice actor behind campaigns for Perrier, Saturn, Crocker Bank ("We've Only Just Begun" was written expressly for that campaign), and—most notoriously—the "Morning in America" campaign for Ronald Reagan. Riney was interviewed on camera before his death last year.

Among the earliest work shown are the legendary Volkswagen ads created by Doyle Dane Bernbach in an era when the VW was widely regarded as "Hitler's car." It's not only the finished ads that are revolutionary; it's also the process that created them. DDB was, amazingly, the first agency in which copywriters and graphic designers worked in teams; previously, advertising was driven by copy, which was written first (I admit I'm sorry I never experienced this primacy of the word) and then shipped upstairs or downstairs to the art department, which laid it out and added pictures. "Creatives," as we're now called, weren't considered true "advertising men": that title went to the account executives—the suits.

The film makes a compelling case that the center of creative gravity has shifted in the last couple of decades from New York City to the West Coast. Besides Riney, whose agency lives on in San Francisco under the corporate aegis of European ad giant Publicis, the Left Coasters in the film include San Franciscans Rich Silverstein and Jeff Goodby, whose "Got Milk?" campaign transformed the milk industry and who memorably associated amphibians with beer; Lee Clow, whose L.A. agency, TBWAChiatDay, has been making wildly creative ads for Apple for a quarter-century; and Dan Wieden and Dave Kennedy of Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, the team that came up with "Just Do It" for Nike as well as memorable work for Coca-Cola and other clients.

Art & Copy would be enjoyable and worthwhile even if it consisted only of interviews and portfolio pieces, but it goes further. Director Pray puts advertising in a larger context, throwing compelling statistics onto the screen (global spending on advertising is expected to reach $544 billion by 2010) and folding in a couple of fascinating side stories. One is about a "sign rotator," a fourth-generation billboard worker whom we see at his vertigo-inducing labor. The other story covers the global satellite phenomenon, which has transformed how, and how often, the world sees TV ads.

The best part of seeing movies at a film festival is often the Q&A with the director afterward. The post-screening session with Doug Pray did not disappoint. I was glad someone asked about the satellite launch we see, in snippets, from preparation through execution. Pray told us he'd wanted from the outset to film a launch, but was turned down by U.S. companies and agencies. He finally found a willing participant in, of all places, French Guyana. His crew flew down there to shoot, and made an astonishing discovery: just a short distance from the launch pad was a series of prehistoric petroglyphs. Communication then: communication now. The petroglyphs found their way into the film, too.

Watch a couple of short clips from the film: one about George Lois here and another one—the dazzling opening sequence—here.

Immediately after the screening I attended a panel session with Silverstein, Goodby, and Wieden, who talked about their lives in advertising and screened more ads, some familiar, some new. One of them—this piece for a nonprofit I'd never heard of, The Girl Effect—consists only of words against blank backgrounds. It is nothing short of thrilling.

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Volkswagen "Lemon" ad from here, where you can also read the story behind the campaign.

Word of the Week: Soramimi

Soramimi: Misunderstanding song lyrics in one language for different words in a second language. The word is Japanese; the literal meaning is "empty ear."

I encountered soramimi in "Exploring Fact City," a March 29 New York Times Week in Review article about Wikipedia:

[A]t the bottom of most articles, there are the categories — impromptu neighborhoods, or perhaps civic organizations, that bind together the virtual encyclopedia. There are unsurprising ones, like “Jewish comedians,” found at the bottom of the Jerry Seinfeld article; and then there are the quirky kind, like this one I stumbled upon: “Literary devices playing with meaning.” It was in the latter category that I came upon the article “Mondegreen,” which describes the phenomenon of mishearing song lyrics, which led to “Soramimi,” a Japanese term for hearing lyrics in foreign languages as Japanese phrases, which led to the discovery that the heavy metal band Metallica has a line in “Enter Sandman” that frequently is heard by Japanese as “Let’s go to Chiyoda Life Insurance.”

Mondegreens are monolingual; soramimi are bilingual.

The Wikipedia entry on soramimi includes many examples taken from the "Soramimi Hour," a long-running feature on the Japanese TV program "Tamori Club." It also lists some non-Japanese examples, including one that miraculously did not cause an international incident:

The Palestinian patriotic song "Blādi, blādi" (بلادي بلادي "Motherland, Motherland") was intentionally "misheard" into Russian (as blyadi, blyadi = "whores, whores") and uploaded to YouTube with Russian subtitles. The resulting video became an instant hit on Russian-language websites and blogs with more than 2 million views, and a number of phrases from the Russian version (especially "No money, long bumblebee") became instant catchphrases.*

Can anyone suggest any examples of non-English song lyrics mis-heard as English?

UPDATE: Mark Liberman, of Language Log, discusses yaourter, a French verb "for the way people attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that they don’t know very well." The literal translation of yaourter is "to yogurt." Be sure to read the comments on the post, too.

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* I'm considering adopting "No money, long bumblebee" as the official catchphrase of Fritinancy.

A Nation of Laws, Illustrated

I'd intended to write about something else entirely today, but then I discovered this dazzling, moving post* by Maira Kalman, titled "May It Please the Court."

It's about laws, justice, and the U.S. Supreme Court, and if that sounds dry to you, you haven't experienced Kalman's special magic. She's a writer, designer, and illustrator whose influences include Matisse and naive art, and a storyteller who understands intuitively how to balance words (rendered in her distinctive calligraphy) and images.

In this post, Kalman pauses on the steps of the Supreme Court to appreciate a visitor in a bright-pink coat, then goes inside.

In the court the lawyers are arguing cases that I kind of understand. But not really.

Not really is putting it mildly. But that is not the point.

It is all about language—the language of dissent.

And the search for meaning.

Keep scrolling to read the whole story, which is all on one long screen: scrolling is part of the treat. Eventually, Kalman interviews Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It's a sweet, unexpectedly revealing portrait that touched me deeply. As did the whole post. Go read it now.

(Special thanks to Marla Erwin.)

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* I'm not convinced that "post" is the right word for what Kalman does here, but the New York Times categorizes it under "blogs," so I'll use the default term.

Is This Thing Working?

Hello ... hello? My goodness, there certainly are a lot of you out there. Can you hear me OK? Everybody check in at the front desk? Good. Welcome to Fritinancy, new readers! I know some of you have come from Twitter—hi there, tweeps!—and from StumbleUpon and Facebook and Digg and Delicious. Oh, look: there's the gang from Beancounters! And some of you have ventured in from the big cities: Kottke, AdWeek, the comments on BitchPh.D. And did I mention Twitter? Yes, I think I did. Sorry: it's been kind of a crazy 24 hours.

Where was I? Right.

So on Wednesday I wrote a post in which I had some fun with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and her interview with the founders of Twitter. And, well, one thing led to another, and instead of a cozy little group that could fit in my backyard, I suddenly had a stadiumful of blog visitors and about ten times more comments than I receive in an average week. For the record, and because I know some of you are keeping score, this blog generally gets about 250 visitors a day, most of them through random (often very random) Google searches. Only about 30 are return visitors (or as I like to think of you, in the warmest and most affectionate of ways, "my base"). So when I get upward of 7,500 visitors in one 24-hour period, it sort of gets my attention. And when during the same period I pick up 80 new Twitter followers (Are they expecting me to lead them somewhere? What a responsibility!), I likewise take notice.

It's been very giddy and exciting, even though I know most of you are going to mosey on as soon as you discover that I do satire only occasionally, and most of the time I plod along, minding my own business—literally. The main menu here is names and brands and, you know, the quirks of the English language. I'm so sorry to disappoint, but that's how it goes. Yes, I've been known to branch out when I'm feeling, how you say, passionate about a subject. But mostly I keep my head down and do my job, hoping to catch the attention of a brilliant creative director or CEO willing to throw large sums of cash in my direction for creating wonderful, memorable, available names.

But gee, it sure has been a real treat having the rest of you here. A couple of points of clarification, and a couple of ground rules, and then I'll go back to alphabetizing your business cards. About the Dowd parody: Yes, I realize that MoDo was having a little fun herself. Yes, I think she generously shared the wit and charm of Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone. No, I don't think Twitter is the equivalent of the telephone, except in a general sense (both are vehicles for communication).

As for the ground rules: Numero uno, I can handle criticism, but I appreciate civil language. Numero two-o, if you want your comment published you have to leave a real e-mail address in the Comments form. Don't worry; I'm the only who will see it. But if it says "anonymous at podunk dot net" (for example), your comment will be read by me and me alone, and your shot at the spotlight will, sadly, be lost.

All right then! Before I leave, how're you doing with the snacks? Need any coffee, donuts, bacon, Tropicana? No? Hey, you've been swell. I mean it. The best! Come back soon, you hear?

Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone

SAN FRANCISCO -- I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. -- Maureen Dowd, "To Tweet or Not to Tweet," New York Times, April 22, 2009.

 

BOSTON --Edgar Allan Poe would love Alexander Graham Bell's workshop here. Pendulums, buzzers, and ticking sounds everywhere, with a mysterious note to the chambermaid in crabbed script. In a droll nod to shifting technologies, there's an 18th-century ear trumpet on the settee, where Mr. Bell evidently left it while in a fog of inventive absentmindedness.

I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventor of the telephone was as loud, intrusive, and soul-destroying as his invention.

I sat down with Mr. Bell, 39, and his assistant Thomas Watson, 22, and asked them to explain why they shouldn't be condemned to a slow, painful death.

ME: The telephone seems like letter-writing without the paper and pen. Is there any message that can't wait for a passenger pigeon?

BELL:  Possibly the message I'd like to deliver to you right now.

ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored housewives and the indolent rich?

BELL: Actually, I was trying to help deaf people.

ME: I heard about a woman who telephoned her husband to say she was in the throes of childbirth. Whatever happened to private pain?

WATSON: (Inaudible.)

ME: Why did you think the answer to telegrams was a noisy new telegram?

BELL: We have designed the receiver so you can leave it off the hook.

ME: Why did you call it a "telephone"? That's Greek! Isn't English good enough for you?

BELL: We tried calling it the FarSound, but Watson turned it into a rude joke.

ME: Would Shakespeare have "telephoned"?

WATSON: Perhaps not. But we have it on good report that Abraham Lincoln would.

ME: Was there anything in your childhood that turned you into a loathsome scourge to humanity?

BELL: You mean my mother's deafness, which made me dedicate my life to helping people communicate?

ME: I would rather be flayed alive and gradually guillotined than use a telephone.

BELL: Operators are standing by.

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Image from here.

Debunking the Myths of Naming

How many of these naming myths do you accept as inalienable truths?

• A domain name must have no more than six letters.
• A name should be an empty vessel.
• Your name should yield almost no results in Google.
• Your name should start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet.
• Your name should begin with/contain the letter(s)___
• Names of such-and-such a type are bad.

The Name Inspector expertly debunks all six of these naming myths in a post that's required reading for anyone embarking on the naming process.

During my own naming career I've encountered all of these myths and more.  A prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist insisted that the corporate name I was developing had to start with a K and be an empty vessel. (His own surname started with a K. The company, which he ended up naming himself, went bust not long afterward.) The six-letter shibboleth is especially popular despite being hokum. And the converse of Myth #6—only names of such-and-such a type are good—also comes up frequently.

Read The Name Inspector's post. Then read my own post about ten common naming myths.

The Naming of Fish...

...is a difficult matter, according to this restaurant review in the Times (UK):

The naming of fish is a nightmare. They have more aliases than Maltese pimps. Can you tell the difference between a scampi, a langoustine, a Dublin Bay prawn or a Norwegian lobster? No, of course you can’t, because they’re all the same thing. Except in America, where scampi can mean an Italian prawn, even though Italian for prawn is gamba. And Americans call prawns shrimp. More than 150 varieties of fish are regularly called red snapper, and monkfish is also anglerfish, and occasionally a goosefish, and quite often mistaken for a grenadier fish, which is also called rat’s tail, though it’s difficult to tell, because none of them is ever sold with its head on. A dead shark is a dogfish, a huss or a rock salmon. In a tin, a pilchard is a pilchard. On the slab, it’s a Cornish sardine. Whelks are not worth eating.

So the dish formerly known as pollock is now colin. Except that colin is already another fish; it’s the French name for hake. Which in Ireland is often called fake, because it’s sold in chippies as cod. The Chilean sea bass is a Patagonian toothfish, and fish fingers aren’t. This business of renaming things to make them taste better or cost more makes me irrationally angry, which is another word for furious. Why should I care? The fish don’t care. They probably go through their whole lives thinking they’re called Derek the whale, before discovering at the last moment that, in fact, they’re colin the pollock.

Read the whole review.

Hat tip to Fritinancy reader Mr. Wuxtry, who forwarded the link. The Times's restaurant reviewer, by the way, is named A.A. Gill. "And who better to write about fish than a man named Gill?" asks Mr. Wuxtry. Who indeed.

Word of the Week: Ludology

Ludology: The science of games. From Latin ludus, "game," which is also the source of ludicrous, delude (to mock, deceive), allude (Latin alludere: to joke, jest), prelude (something that is played beforehand), and other English words.

Writer and ludologist Clive Thompson spoke about his science in an April 19 "On the Media" segment about do-it-yourself XBox game development. (Transcript available Monday afternoon.) Thompson, who has been called "the Lester Bangs of ludology,"¹ writes about games on his blog, Collision Detection, and in publications such as Wired and the New York Times Magazine. Back in 2006 Thompson wrote:

In video game circles, the big debate these days is about whether video games are driven by narrative or by play-style — narrativology vs. ludology. I think both approaches are useful to understanding games, though I lean towards ludology as more germanely important. While narrative applies to novels, plays, TV, movies, and games, play — working within a set of rules that impose an arbitrary goal and make it tricky to achieve — applies only to games. It is what makes games most game-like.

I've had the privilege to work with a ludologist right here in the Bay Area. Nicole Lazzaro, founder of XEO Design, has been named one of Gamasutra's top 20 women in games. She's identified four "fun keys": easy fun, hard fun, people fun, and serious fun.

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¹ Lester Bangs (1949-1982) was a gonzo rock 'n' roll critic. "The Lester Bangs of ludology" seems eminently qualified for enshrinement in The Rosa Parks of Blogs, a a ludicrously addictive blog by Mark Peters that collects examples of the snowclone "X is the Y of Z."