Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: A review of “Dreyer’s English”

My March column for the Visual Thesaurus is something a little different: a review of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, by Benjamin Dreyer. Dreyer is managing editor and copy chief at Random House, and a witty dispenser of advice and stories. (If you’re not following him on Twitter, you should be.) The book was a joy to read and great fun to review. Good news for all my stingy thrifty readers: There’s no paywall on this column, so dive right in (and share).

The author and the authored

 

Here’s an excerpt:

Dreyer's English is several things at once: a description and dissection of the art of copyediting, a set of tips and guidelines, and a memoir of a working life spent with some of the best writers of our era (to name a few: Elizabeth Strout, Michael Chabon, E.L. Doctorow, and, posthumously, Shirley Jackson). It’s the tips and guidelines that I’m guessing most readers will zoom in on, because who among us, no matter how experienced or widely published, doesn’t feel just a little bit uncertain about comma placement and possessive apostrophes and the correct spelling of “leprechaun”?

Benjamin Dreyer is happy to oblige. He’s firm about the series or Oxford comma (not “serial,” comma, he writes, because “for me ‘serial’ evokes ‘killer’”) — the second comma in “lettuce, turnips, and peas”: “Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don't want to belabor the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it.” All well and good for him, because, as he tells us, the use of the series comma is the only hard-and-fast style rule applied to all Random House books. If you’re a newspaper copy editor in the United States, though, you’ll follow a different standard: Associated Press style, which frowns on series commas. (In an interview, Dreyer admitted that until a few years ago he hadn’t heard of AP style. Copyediting is a multifarious profession.)

Read the rest of “Dreyer’s English”: An Utterly Readable Style Guide.

June linkfest

“The use of rainbows as logo design elements has fallen back almost to its pre-1970s level, while the use of rainbow colors in logos has taken off.” (Emblemetric)

Image via Emblemetric

 

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Remember tronc, possibly the worst corporate name ever? You can forget it now. (The Verge)

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After 27 years, Greece has finally agreed to the formal name of its northern neighbor, the Republic of North Macedonia. (BBC)

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This ad for Texas Congressional candidate Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar sets a new standard for political advertising: It’s well written, brilliantly edited, and engaging.

January linkfest

Is an Eataly ad for truffles offensive to Italians and Italian-Americans? (Chicago Tribune)

July Linkfest

The leaves of Citrus hystrix are used in many South and Southeast Asian cuisines; they’re sometimes called by their Thai name, makrut, but in many English-speaking countries they’ve long been called kaffir lime. That’s changing thanks to a protest “against the racial and religious slur of ‘kaffir’,” writes Tiffany Do in SF Weekly (“Citrus-Based Racism Leads Market to Change Product Names”). “Kaffir,” which comes from an Arabic word meaning “unbeliever,” was appropriated by English colonizers in South Africa, where it was used as a slur and a term of abuse against blacks. “What’s most surprising in this whole controversy is that the issue hasn't been addressed – and remedied – before now,” writes SF Weekly’s Do. Most markets are switching to the neutral “lime leaves.”

Photo via Flicker/robinejay

 

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Who decides what makes a word “real”? Anne Curzan, a language historian and member of the American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel, explains why she finds language change “not worrisome but fun and fascinating.” (TEDxUofM talk; video and transcript.)

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What do speakers of Japanese, Spanish, and Finnish call “John Doe,” Mr. Anonymous Average Guy? Baby Name Wizard looks at the names of “nobodies” around the world. (For inanimate placeholder names, see my 2008 post on kadigan.)

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Struggling with the best way to tell your corporate story? ThinkShift distills the narrative into five essential elements.

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“The CIA is a prescriptivist scold, a believer in the serial comma, and a champion of ‘crisp and pungent’ language ‘devoid of jargon’”: Michael Silverberg, writing in Quartz about the recently declassified—and “ruthless”—CIA style manual. (Via @jessesheidlower.) By the way, since June 6 the CIA has had a public Twitter account.

 

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.

— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

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Another reason for style-guide fans to rejoice: the BBC News style guide is “now fully and freely available online,” writes Stan Carey in his Sentence First blog. I was particularly amused by the “Americanisms” section, which includes this starchy sentence:

We say: meet (not ‘meet with’),consult (not ‘consult with’), talk to (not ‘talk with’), protest against a decision (not ‘protest a decision’), appeal against a verdict (not ‘appeal a verdict’).

And, n.b., the BBC does not punctuate the abbreviations i.e. or e.g.

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In the early to mid-1960s, Mad magazine carried on a “glorious” and “fearless” anti-smoking campaign through parody ads that “closely resembled the real ones that ran on television and in magazines,” writes David Margolick in the New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog. The ads attacked tobacco companies, ad agencies, and smokers with equal-opportunity opprobrium. Mad has always been ad-free, and—unusual for the 1960s—its offices were “largely smoke free” as well: the magazine’s publisher, William Gaines, “was fanatically opposed to the habit,” writes Margolick.

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It’s not every day that a name developer has the chance to name a radically new technology. Anthony Shore had such a chance when the makers of a “cinematic virtual reality” device hired him. Read about how Jaunt got its name.

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“Machines don't need names, but we feel the need to name them,” writes Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic (“Why People Give Human Names to Machines”). The urge has long been with us, or at least some of us: a siege engine was named “Domina Gunilda” (“Lady Gunild”) in an Anglo-Norman document of 1330-1.

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Some of Facebook’s conference rooms are named after bad ideas (Sub-Prime Mortgages, Land War in Asia). The genetic-research company 23andMe names its computer servers after characters and plot points in “Arrested Development” (Gob, Annyong, Nevernude). These and many more lists of “clever names that companies have called their conference rooms, servers, etc.,” via Quora.

(My favorite submission comes from Erica Friedman, who once worked for an ad agency whose conference rooms were named Ideation, Creation, Dream, Coopetition [sic], and Resonate. “It was horrible and miserable and it still makes me shudder,” she writes. Erica and I are not related, but we are definitely soulmates.)

February Linkfest

Rebranding Cupid, just in time for Valentine’s Day. 

 

By Massive Media. See also my February 2010 post about another Valentine’s Day rebrand, this one by Under Consideration for Studio 360.

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An order of roastbeef with a side of stalefish? Yes, we’re talking snowboarding lingo. The Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Bachman interviews snowboarders; Ben Zimmer, at Slate, analyzes “I’ll just huck it,” which caused an “overanxious” BBC presenter to “freak out.”

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Leave it to the inventive and enterprising Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, to turn language peeves (“literally,” “could care less,” “very unique,” et al.) into a card game in which the object is “to annoy your opponent to death.” She’s raising money for Peeve Wars through Fund Anything; contribute now to claim your own card set or another nifty reward.

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Speaking of peeves, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has had it up to here with verbal anachronisms in otherwise classy TV shows—like, say, Showtime’s Masters of Sex: “We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator.” See also a response and amplification from the master of anachronism-spotting, Ben Schmidt. (As you may recall, this stuff annoys me, too.)

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Some people peeve about new, “unnecessary” words. But language blogger Stan Carey defends them: “Avoiding new and ‘needless’ words in formal contexts is all well and good, but what’s wrong with a grand superfluity elsewhere? Will the language look untidy if words float around not filling vital gaps? Will they gum up the works?”

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“We think first / Of vague words that are synonyms for progress / And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.” This Is a Generic Brand Video, from McSweeney’s, of course.

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Orenitram, a drug for pulmonary arterial hypertension, is an ananym: The name was created by reverse-spelling the first eight letters of the name of the drug company’s CEO, Martine Rothblatt. But that’s just the beginning of a truly remarkable name story, reported by Catchword.

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The new BuzzFeed style guide answers the really tough spelling and usage questions: Is bitchface one word or two? (One.) Is there an E in chocolaty? (No.) What’s the proper abbreviation of douchebag? (d-bag.) What’s the difference between wack and whack? (Look it up; it’s in there.) And, FYI, the word is spelled whoa. Don’t make us repeat ourselves.

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“Writing and editing are linked but distinct enterprises, and distinct temperaments are involved. Very few people can move smoothly from the one enterprise to the other.” – John McIntyre, one of the few. 

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The second lives of dead US brands: Woolworths thrives in Australia, Nextel in Latin America, Friendster in Southeast Asia, Mister Donut (“Misudo”) and Pan Am in Japan. (Hat tip: Rochelle Kopp and Shogannai.)

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Arika Okrent sorts out 11 brands with plural problems (topping the list: LEGO).

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A linguist (Gretchen McCulloch) explains doge grammar: “[B]roadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling.”

 

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Who names the color of the year? Professional namers, that’s who. The Boston Globe interviewed Bay Area name developer Anthony Shore for his insights into color naming; the article is headlined—care to guess?—“What’s in a Name?” (I tackled the subject of color names myself for a 2011 Visual Thesaurus column.)

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From the indispensable TV Tropes, the periodic table of storytelling.

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Speaking of charts and taxonomies, here’s a “marketing technology landscape supergraphic”—the logos of 947 companies in 43 categories—created by Scott Brinker.  Wow. Very names.

 

Read Brinker's follow-up post about the chart.

Best Usage Question Ever?

Yes, I think so.

Q. When referring to a zombie, should I use the relative pronoun who (which would refer to a person) or that (since, technically, the zombie is no longer living)? Essentially, does a zombie cease to become a “person” in the grammatical sense?

A. Let’s assume this is a serious question, in which case you, as the writer, get to decide just how much humanity (if any) and grammatical sense you wish to invest in said zombie. That will guide your choice of who or that.

—Chicago Manual of Style Q & A, February 2013

Short and Sweet

Inspired by Christopher Johnson’s new book Microstyle, which I reviewed yesterday, I’m devoting a few blog posts to good examples of micro-messages. Here’s some of the short, well-executed copy I’ve noticed lately.

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Stella & Dot, a direct-sales jewelry company, invites website readers to join its sales force with this clever enticement:

Become a Stylist

No Glass Cases or Ceilings

“No glass cases” evokes a picture of museum-like department-store displays, which say “Look but don’t touch”—unlike Stella & Dot’s warm, friendly approach. The glass ceiling, of course, is the barrier to professional advancement that frustrates many women. And “stylist” may be just a fancy word for “saleswoman,” but it makes the job sound chic, creative, and powerful.

In just eight words, a vivid image that’s a model of brand consistency.

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The next two examples come from the Wayback Machine—specifically, the wonderful Flickr sets of Mr. Frank Kelsey, who photographs matchbooks, sugar cubes, ashtrays, cigarette lighters, and napkins once used as tiny advertising vehicles. Here’s a Marina Lounge cocktail napkin (from the late 1940s, I’m guessing) that condenses a lot of branding and humor into just a few square inches.

 

Curious about the pink elephants?

The art and typography on these artifacts are euphoria-inducing, and I was floored by how much attention was lavished on the miniature messages. Here’s a sugar cube from “Indianapolis’ Smartest and Gayest Restaurant.”

 

I’d love to see a revival of these message-laden freebies.

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Finally, here’s a sample packet—excuse me, sachet—of Method laundry detergent.

 

The copy reads:

(It’s small, but not this small, silly. This is a sample.)

Even the instructions on the reverse have a spark of brand personality.

To use: Snip sachet open, squeeze all product into tray or directly into machine. Rush to store and buy.

For the record, that “Fresh Air” scent made my eyes water and my head throb. The copy, on the other hand, is indeed refreshing.

More micro-messages tomorrow.

January Linkfest

A little more year-end business, and then it’s in with the new.

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Brand New picks the best and worst identities (that’s “logos” to you civilians) of 2010.

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WTF is the word of the year, declares Dennis Baron on his blog, Web of Language. OMG, he has a point!

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It was a very good year for “jargon, mixed metaphors, and ridiculous euphemisms,” writes the Financial Times’s Lucy Kellaway. Read her 2010 Management Guff Awards (reprinted in the Irish Times). (Via The Name Inspector.)

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DTF, mantrum, and other top terms we learned on reality TV in 2010. (Via my brother Michael.)

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Voting is still open for Macquarie Dictionary’s 2010 Australian words of the year. Winners are traditionally announced in early February. I’d like to see screwage—a cynical synonym for “corkage”—gain wider acceptance up in this half of the world. (Via Ben Zimmer.)

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Let’s bury the not-a-word myth, writes Mark Peters in GOOD magazine. “These not-a-word claims are silly, illogical, and can mostly be summed up like so: ‘I hate this word, therefore it is not a word. So there.’ This makes as much sense as a deranged birdwatcher who, for some reason, decided warblers were the devil’s work and therefore lacked bird-ness.”

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How eight famous cheeses got their names. I’ve eaten Monterey Jack practically my entire life and never known who Jack was.

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How to get anyone to do the dishes—or, by extension, to buy whatever you’re selling. On the always-readable Copylicious blog.

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The problem with student writing isn’t slang or texting abbreviations, writes Ben Yagoda in the Chronicle of Higher Education: it’s literalness, ornateness, excessive length, and “train-wreck” punctuation. Read “The Elements of Clunk.” (Via Ron Charles.)

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I’m loving this new blog, Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising.

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Why are Z and X so popular in drug names? Hint: Think Scrabble. (Via Our Bold Hero.)

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Should I work for free? Probably not, but check the chart anyway.

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Department of Meta: The most amazing press release ever written.

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And just for fun: What were the best-selling books on your birth date? If you were born on January 14, 1965, works by Saul Bellow, Louis Auchincloss, Gore Vidal, General Douglas MacArthur, and Jean-Paul Sartre occupied top positions on that week’s best-seller list. Last week’s equivalents on the New York Times nonfiction and fiction lists? Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, Justin (Shit My Dad Says) Halpern, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin. Draw your own conclusions. Oh, and happy birthday.

May Linkfest

Two long, six short:

The elegantly designed Lexicalist, which calls itself "a demographic dictionary of modern American English," is the most edifying time-waster you'll encounter this month. The creation of David Bamman, a researcher in computational linguistics and natural language processing at Tufts University, Lexicalist "reads through the web to find out who's talking about what." You can discover the relative popularity of a word: For example, Lexicalist tells me that people are talking about "Twitter" 13 percent more today than they were a month ago. You can find out the geographical distribution of a slang term (check out the hella map). Or you can see which parts of the country are talking about specific topics. Have fun! (UPDATE: Read a Language Log guest post by David Bamman about using Twitter to map the demographics of American English.)

Writers, editors, and publishers have two definitions for style. It can mean a set of rules that a publication follows ("house style") or a distinctive authorial voice. (For more, read my a 2007 post, "Style vs. Style.") There are many "house styles," known primarily by their acronyms: AP, CMoS, APA. Now Mary Beth Protomastro, who edits founding editor* of the Copyediting newsletter, has created Online Stylebooks "to help copy editors (including herself) quickly consult a variety of style guides." This is useful news for anyone plying a scribely trade, but it was received with something less than enthusiasm over at Language Log, which belongs to the "let a thousand usages bloom" school of descriptivist editing. "I'm not saying that having a house style is a bad thing, or arguing against it," shrugged Language Logger Mark Liberman, "I'm just sightly puzzled about why people care that all the articles in notable publication X should hyphenate and abbreviate according to one set of rules, while all the articles in esteemed publication Y consistently do it a different way." Your own opinions are welcome in Comments here.

And the short takes:

The best television commercial ever. (Kottke)

Vanity Googling helps copywriter land a job. (AdFreak)

A bazillion airline logos that incorporate stylized birds. (Logo Design Love, via Kottke.)

The history of the "Dude." (Mark Peters in Good magazine)

Open Dictionary is a more reliable, cleaner Urban Dictionary. (Lifehacker, via Karen Wise.)

Everything you need to know about sex Cosmopolitan magazine. (via Beancounters)

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* Thanks to Mark Allen for reminding me that Wendalyn Nichols is Copyediting's current editor.

How Time Magazine Got Its Name (and Its Peculiar Style)

In "Untimely," her essay in the April 19 New Yorker, Jill Lepore writes about the decades-long spat between the founders of Time and The New Yorker, Henry Luce and Harold Ross. Luce and his Yale classmate Briton Hadden started Time in 1923, but not before dithering about the magazine's name:

Luce and Hadden thought about calling their magazine Destiny, which hints at the size of their dream. They also tried out What’s What, and for a long time they called it Facts. What Time became is lavishly celebrated in “Time: The Illustrated History of the World’s Most Influential Magazine” (Rizzoli; $50), by Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva. Luce came up with the name after a late-night subway ride, during which he found himself staring at an advertisement that read “Time for a Change.” “That’s it,” Hadden said. “Time” was perfect, since the magazine’s strategy was twofold: it would be a history of our time, chronicling the events of the day, and it would save readers time.

(In 1930, Luce launched Fortune. He had wanted to call it Modern Business, but after the 1929 stock-market crash, Lepore writes, he changed the name "to something that allowed for twists of fate.")

Hadden was Time's first editor; Luce ran the business side:

The idea was that they'd rotate. They agreed, though, that the magazine had to have a language of its own: Timestyle. “You’re writing for straphangers,” a former professor of theirs advised them. “You’ve got to write staccato.” Hadden marked up a translation of the Iliad, underscoring compound phrases, like “wine-dark sea.” (A “sea as dark as wine” dragged.) No longer did events take place “in the nick of time” but “in time’s nick.” Everything was epic. Homer is why Time’s story about the Scopes trial began this way: “The pens and tongues of contumely were arrested. Mocking mouths were shut. Even righteous protestation hushed its clamor, as when, having striven manfully in single combat, a high-helmed champion is stricken by Jove’s bolt and the two snarling armies stand at sudden gaze, astonished and bereft a moment of their rancor.”. . .

Hadden liked to coin words, compounds like “news-magazine.” He imported “tycoon,” “pundit,” and “kudos” into English. He filled a notebook with lists. Famed Phrases: “flabby-chinned.” Forbidden Phrases: “erstwhile” (use “onetime” instead). Unpardonable Offenses: failing to print someone’s nickname. He was fond of middle names, of inverted subject and predicate phrases, of occupations as titles: “famed poet William Shakespeare” and “Demagog Hitler.” (What next? one reader wanted to know. “Onetime evangelist Jesus Christ?”) Hadden was uncompromising and, not infrequently, explosive. His Timestyle manual listed his cardinal rules: “Be specific. Be impersonal. Appear to be fair. Be not redundant. Reduce to lowest terms. You cannot be too obvious.” Scowl-faced was Editor Hadden, forgotten mag-man, called by the boys “the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang.”

Meanwhile, at The New Yorker—whose mission was to be "interpretive, not stenographic"—reporter Wolcott Gibbs published a parody of Timestyle. "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind," Gibbs wrote. The article concluded: "Where it will all end, knows God!"

Read the rest of Lepore's article.

Then read Janet Maslin's review of a new biography of Henry Luce, The Publisher, in the New York Times. "He made up in pretension what he lacked in personal charm," Maslin writes about Luce.