A series of bizarre email troubles recently have got me thinking: Why is there not a word – at least a catchy phrase that someone has thrown against the wall – for email-induced confusion? One hardly goes a week without some incidence of screwy lag time between sending and receipt (at least, supposedly), or mistaken tone of voice, or any number of things. Am I right?
The wheels keep turning. … What other words are we missing? (more…)
I just saw the movie Contraband. I absolutely love fast-paced films about intelligent, illicit activity. Plus, Mark Wahlberg is pretty convincing in criminal protagonist roles, so I have no complaints.
But there always seem to be elements of movies like this one that have gaps. You know what I’m talking about: parts of the storyline that simply seemed to be overlooked; jumps from one thing to another that don’t quite add up. I tend to leave the theater and start to get all riled up as I try to put the pieces together and recognize that a handful of them are missing.
I figure that I can write these ‘gaps’ off in one of two ways: 1) The writers and producers don’t have a clue, which is unlikely. Or 2) A number of scenes were cut out deliberately because the movie would run seven hours if all of the connections were forged, and people wouldn’t stay to the end anyway. (Sure, there’s the third option that I simply missed the connectors, but since I’m always right, that can’t possible be the case and I’m justified in overlooking it. Please sense the facetiousness here, and roll with me for the sake of argument.)
I attended a discussion about urban art in the community with visiting artist Lavie Raven at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art last night. To be honest, I was there to support some of the great people that are tirelessly investing energy in arts education in our community; but didn’t really expect to personally, much less professionally, take many juicy nuggets of insight away from it.
Leave it to them to inspire me in spite of myself.
Lavie and fellow panelists spoke to the rush that graffiti artists get from their work. The high generated from writing on a wall – “writing” being more than just words and more than just “tagging” your name with a spray can; but investing in the color, contour and soul of a message that can inherently cross cultural barriers.
Someone in the audience asked if teaching urban art is basically teaching kids to be better vandals, which struck a chord with me because the conversation had led my mind to such a different space. My first thought was, “Wow, if that’s true, maybe I’ve been studying to be a vandal my whole life.”
No, I’ve never done graffiti. But I have been researching art, cataloging my own emotions, and trying to find the perfect words to say exactly what needs to be said ever since I can remember. And now I’m at a place where we’re working every day to strategically develop design and message as eloquently as some of these writers brand themselves. The biggest difference is that our expression of creativity is legal.
It’s so important that we (being the community at large) don’t push these artists away from their amazing raw talent and vision, but appreciate it, help them hone in on it and occasionally look to the writing on the wall for a little inspiration…
I want to say a quick “thank you” to Nebraska Humanities Council, Kent Bellows Studio & Center for Visual Arts, The Union for Contemporary Art, and all of the folks that made the event happen and made me think.
I love being reminded of how easy it is to be enlightened and humbled in a city like ours if you just open your eyes.
It has been an interesting couple of decades watching language evolve rapidly around substantive, swift changes in our technological lives. The speed of innovations in technology has not always been met with a similarly quick development in language or, at least, in a consistent, agreed upon form of expression that we can all use to describe the same concepts. The announcement by the Associated Press last Friday that their recommended style guide for the phrase “Web site” will now be “website” would seem a small update, but reflects the enormity of change wrought in our lives by technology.
The human condition has always been illuminated in art and science and manifested through a persistent hunger to know more. For millennia, people have explored curiously the worlds around and within us and, along the way, produced momentous works of art, knowledge and scientific discovery. In tandem with those explorations and discoveries, the framework in which to discuss them has also required innovation. By definition, innovative concepts require innovative tags, labels, words and symbols to facilitate a conversation about them.
So, as we move from Web site to website and, most likely, from e-mail, e-commerce, e-anything to eeverything, consider also how our language or symbols of communication, representation, identification and meaning are changing in tune with our understanding of our technological lifestyles. (more…)
A compelling interview recently on National Public Radio (read/listen to it here) got me thinking about the power of language to influence the way we think. Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist at Stanford, asserted a connection between the language that we use and the way it makes us perceive the world around us. 
Her experiment involved testing how separate groups who spoke German and Spanish used verbs to describe a bridge. The German speakers, in whose language a “bridge” has a feminine gender, used words like “beautiful,” “slender” and “elegant,” while the Spanish speakers, in whose language a “bridge” has a masculine gender used words like “strong,” “sturdy” and “towering.”
To further test her hypothesis that people’s thoughts were impacted by their language, Boroditsky invented a language called Gumbuzi. Her findings indicated that people’s grammatical understanding did affect their sense of the world around them.
This is a developing area of science and there are a number of viewpoints on this topic. For marketers, it does raise the issue about how we can use language as part of our copy messaging to arouse or induce certain unconscious perspectives in our target audience, especially where regional dialects may be in play. I’d be interested if you copy writers out there have any experience or opinion of this phenomenon. Let me know …
