I’ve complained before, on this blog, about some common misspellings that get to me like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Yesterday Megan tipped me off to 11 Gorgeously Ironic Misspellings In Protest Signs on 11Points.com, by Sam Greenspan. Misspelling is bad, yes, but it’s got to be worse, or at the very least more ironic, when people butcher the language while complaining about language.  The post includes pictures showing the following exact quotes taken from protest signs defending the English language:

• Get a brain, morans
• Respect Are Country, Speak English
• This is America and our only lanaguage is English

You tell me: is that a great argument for basic spelling? It reminds me of Harvard math professor Tom Lehrer’s song Be Prepared, that included the following line:

Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well
Don’t write naughty words on walls that you can’t spell

Useful sentiment. And, along the same lines, if you’re going to brandish your politics for all to see, in your yard … well, do you think this illustration is purposeful parody?

Finally, back to the xenophobic politics of the English-only crowd, just one last picture:

The photos shown here are just two of the 11 on the original post. Definitely worth a look: 11 Gorgeously Ironic Misspellings In Protest Signs on 11Points.com.

(Photo credit: both of those photos are taken directly from the post on 11Points.com, 11 Gorgeously Ironic Misspellings In Protest Signs)

Accents, real speech, figures of speech, colorful speech. Expressions. The way we use language fascinates me. I wonder if technology changes it?

I have questions:

• Why is groovy so hideously and embarrassingly obsolete, but cool is still cool? Am I the only one who still likes Paul Simon’s song, Feelin’ Groovy?



• Why does just sayin work so well, especially in Twitter, to smooth out rough edges, frame thoughts, and soften things? It’s almost like a Photoshop effect to make a photograph look like a painting. I don’t get it. I mean, I’m just sayin.
• And why does is it just me seem to flow so well, almost like just sayin, as a statement softener?
• How do you pronounce LOL? Can you use it outside of instant messaging and/or Twitter? Is it okay in normal conversation? And what about WTF and OMG, both acronyms using single-syllable letters instead of single-syllable words. I think I know the answer to that one. Not that there is a single right answer. BTW, I liked it when my daughter was studying in Madrid, and came up with QTF. Although I hate the F part of that.

And also, some simple observations, about language in my lifetime, and how it’s been changing.

• I love the way Spanish has grown and prospered inside our modern American English. Starting with simple expressions like nada and the whole enchilada, there’s Spanish all over the place now, and I, for one, love it. I think it’s a living example of the kind of natural change that brought French into English a few centuries ago, and that gave us, gradually, the English we speak instead of the English they spoke in Shakespeare’s time. I like to see that living change. And I like it that it’s happened before. Deja vu. And here’s a test of popular culture: can you say deja vu without adding the Yogi Berra addition, all over again? Nobody seems to use the naked deja vu expression anymore. It’s verboten.
• I hate the expression that something sucks, meaning that it’s bad. Do you know where that expression has been? And if you don’t, I warn you, don’t ask anybody who was a boy in the 1950s or 1960s. And then there are those related expressions, like bite me, or it bites the big one. Not good. It’s weird, to me, that these are now commonplace, and accepted by picky censors, like on network TV.
• And, speaking of what’s acceptable on network television these days, I kind of like what Jon Stuart and Stephen Colbert have done with the beeped-out expression. Have you noticed how well they both use that? This stuff can be overused, but still, language and expression prevails.
• And all the cleaned expressions, like bleeping and fricken, [Ed. Note: and the popular (among sci-fi fans) frak from the Battlestar Gallactica TV series].
• Is it possible that all of the silliness related to code works and acceptable and nonacceptable has contributed to the twisting and distortions?
• Which reminds me, the overuse of certain words becomes just silly. I listen to people on a bus unable to say a simple sentence without adding fuckin after every three words. What’s up with that? Doesn’t it get in the way? I think an actual conversation with all that extra burden would be exhausting. Do they even hear it?
• I suspect that the worst language anywhere in this country, in terms of supposedly swearing and foul words and such, is found on the elementary school playgrounds, particularly where the fourth-sixth grade boys are playing?

I’m just sayin.

I was just getting back to the office yesterday, a Monday morning after a week away – 4 days of business, and 3 relaxing and invigorating days in Yosemite, which is really away — when Dan Levine (@schoolmarketer on Twitter) suggested I read The social media country club on Mark Shaeffer’s businessgrow blog.

Yes, I’m a sucker for contrary points of view. Get a group going, approach consensus, and I want to read the one who’s out in left field. If everybody else is right and this one’s all wrong, so what, I can work that out. But then how often is left field the right place to be?

Mark starts out objecting to rave reviews of Trust Agents, the book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. It’s subtitle is “Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust.” I haven’t read it, but I’ve read a lot of favorable comments. Mark, however, says those favorable comments are the result of group think and myth making:

The “thought leaders” of social media marketing are a country club fearful of saying anything negative or controversial about another club member. The real commerce of social media is trading favors and a negative comment breaks the favor chain.

He paints a picture a lot like the fable of the emperor’s new clothes. You can see with this quote, under the general heading of credibility, that at the very least he’s making his position clear:

Take a close look at the credentials (if you can find any) of nearly any leading social media marketing “expert.”  How many have ever had a real sales job or have been actually accountable for delivering new value in a marketplace by creating, testing and distributing a product on a meaningful scale?   Very few.  Yet these are our marketing “gurus?”  In a communication channel already dominated by porn-peddling, get-rich-quick nimrods, it simply doesn’t help our collective credibility to have our most visible advocates spouting incredibly naive statements about marketing fundamentals they know little about.

I don’t know that I agree; it seems too harsh to me. I don’t think expertise is measured only by job history, or sales history, or middle management in a big company history, which seems to be laying just under the surface of the blogger bashing. And I wish Mark had said which statements in the book are naive. But it’s certainly a very contrarian point of view. And worth considering. So I’m sharing it here.

(Photo credit: STILLFX/Shutterstock)

Just a few years ago I was mourning the loss of the printed word in our media-hungry and web-hungry society. Even people I really respect, although most of them much younger than I, were starting to show cavalier disregard for the English language. I’d grimace while reading something that mistook then for than, or they’re for their, or misspelled lots of simple words. The response would be rolled eyes, like…

why do you care? You can read it. You can see what it says.

It makes me feel like the archetypical grumpy old man.

Meanwhile, television news has taken over from print news. Newspapers are dying. And books?  Doomed. I picked this up in a 2007 New Yorker piece called Twilight of Books:

In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”

But then — about 2007 for me, late, I know, compared to the web literate elites — I caught on to blogs. And discovered where writing had gone to; and where people cared about writing. Writing and reading are alive and well, it turns out, but they’ve migrated to some extent. The Huffington Post, the world’s leading blog, gets something upwards of 20 million unique visitors per month.  Blog after blog is about writing: writing well, writing better. I just looked: more than 10,000 hits on Google for the search term “writing blog headlines.” And I keep stumbling on blogs that are exhilaratingly well written. Look at Ann Handley’s Annarchy, for example (for a good sample, read Refugee at Home). Or Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist (sample this post for good writing, but you should know first that, like a lot of good writing, it’s dark.). And I read business and entrepreneurship blogs that are not just good content, but extremely well written. Seth Godin delivers a short beautifully written post almost every day.

Lately there’s twitter, limiting the writing to 140 characters, putting a whole new twist on writing. There’s so many examples of good writing in 140 characters that it’s like searching for needles in a pile of needles. Do this twitter search for haiku to see what I mean. And then I just browsed the tweets of the people above, and came up with this one, by Penelope Trunk. I didn’t have to search for a good one, this was simply her latest as I wrote this post:

I forget to tell the waiter to hold the bacon bits. Then I go wild: I decide a Jewish woman who dates a pig farmer can take a taste of pork.

That’s good writing. And there’s so much of it out there. I’m feeling way better about the future or writing after all.

(Photo credit: Maria Skaldina/Shutterstock)

Back in my distant past I had to learn to live with editing. I was in my twenties. It made me mad. Why change my stuff? But it also made my stuff better.

“Berry, you write like a God-damned literature major.” (Norberto Schwarzman)

So said the overnight editor at UPI back in 1972.  He did me a great favor. “Write for the reader,” he would say, way more often than I would have liked. 

By the late 70s I was writing for a Business Week editor (Hugh Menzies) who consistently cut the shreds out of my writing, and, dammit, every time he did he made it better. I sent my stories to him for about four years. And I learned that cutting was good.

I’ve been writing professionally for 30-some years now, and I’ve never written anything that wasn’t better after cutting. So I’ve come to love cutting.

If you want to read some really good advice about this, read Editing for Tighter Copy: How to Write with a Knife on Copyblogger yesterday. And if you want to write better, print it and paste it on your wall.

Yes, I think it does matter. And no, although it won’t last, not like it is now, it is the beginning of something that will last, but will be changing a lot. I could say the same about personal computing, the Web, and blogging.

Twitter is all the rage because it hit fertile ground. People like it, people use it, and because what it does catches us. The key to it is something related to publishing and broadcasting. It’s why I like writing this blog, why you like writing your blog, and why both of us read each other’s.

It’s related to instincts deeply embedded in our human nature.

Image by Carla16 on Flickr

The first of these is expression. When nothing else was possible, people drew on cave walls. That was about expression. So is telling stories, reciting  poems, and singing songs. It’s in our nature. We crave expression.

The second is curiosity. We want to see the pictures, hear the stories, know what’s up, and what’s going on.

And then, beyond these two basic instincts, there’s how much we like gathering, and shows, entertainment, and keeping up with each other.

All of which happens on Twitter. It’s not email, it’s not blogging, it’s publishing in 140-character pieces. Do it well and you have more people reading what you publish. Do it poorly and you have nobody reading what you publish. Make it interesting, informative, or funny and it’s good to do and people will follow. Use it to sell stuff or whine or share trivial life details and people will stop following. Use it to push sales talk at people and they will stop following.

Which–the click to follow or not–is the clincher, in my opinion, that makes Twitter more significant. I’ve seen some very interesting musings on Twitter’s future, such as Jeff Sexton’s piece asking is Twitter is digging its own ditch?  He says some of the Web’s bright and shiny new things (he mentions Digg and Technorati) burst on the scene, become popular, and then got manipulated, declined. The classic pattern is email with spam now killing it. He asks whether that might happen to Twitter.

And I think not. Because of both sides of the coin: the instinctive allure of posting like this, and reading the good posts, which is one side; and the ability to click and unfollow people, which is the other.

So please, follow me on Twitter: click here.

Labels, and labels. Two days ago I complained here about self-proclaimed “experts” and “gurus.” And today I realize that I do the same thing myself, calling myself an entrepreneur. I ran into this interesting thought:

I must admit that when I hear the word (which inundates conversation and — more interestingly– the personal summaries of seemingly everyone over the age of twenty on my two favorite social networks), a little voice in my head channels Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, and I say to myself in a nerdy accent to the entrepreneur in cyberspace, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Gulp. She — Colleen Dilenschneider, in The Mind-Numbing Evolution of the Term “Entrepreneur” — has a point. She goes on:

The title of entrepreneur– especially when said in description of oneself– is losing its meaning to me and I wonder how long it will be until the word has virtually no meaning at all.  Perhaps my scope is skewed, and this is an issue among all social network users, regardless of generation.  When I read entrepreneur in a person’s description, I think, “I need to learn more.”

Well said. And while Colleen links all the entrepreneurship to Gen Y traits …

With the rapid onset of social media, does the word entrepreneur mean less because we are all entrepreneurs? Is generation Y an entire generation of entrepreneurs? We certainly seem to be.

… I think it’s more than that. It’s most of our entire solopreneur-enamored, pushed entrepreneurs, baby boomer recession-survival Western world.

We love labels. Experts, gurus, entrepreneurs, nonconformists, bloggers, professionals, rock-star programmers, middle managers, and out-of-the-box thinkers all of us. We like working with labels and slogans because, as with the 30-second news byte, it makes life easier. We all need our labels. Sometimes it seems like the beginning of a board game, choosing your token to play monopoly.

And if everybody has the same label, the game doesn’t work.

(photo credit: izzie_whizzie on Flickr)

I heard a comedian the other day, on the radio, making fun of how the rest of the country looks down on a Southern accent. It was a funny routine. I wish I could quote from it, but I was driving, it was on the radio, so I can’t.

I dealt with a man once, PhD in Chemistry from Princeton, who called me out on that. He got me on the phone one day and challenged me to pay attention to his words instead of his accents. He said something like “everybody I talk to in California acts like I’m stupid, and nobody listens.” I’m impressed by degrees, though, so I listened. Only because he challenged me. And I was glad I did. He was a very smart guy, with a real talent for software. He spoke with a thick Louisiana accent. Our business never went anywhere, but for other reasons. And he taught me that I too could be a bigot. I didn’t like that lesson, but I learned.

I was reminded of that the other day with Seth Godin’s am I the only one distracted by apostrophes and weird “quoting”? He explains how grammar mistakes with apostrophes and quotes distract him. Me too. It clouds his judgment. Mine too. He says:

When I get a manuscript or see a sign that misuses its and it’s and quotes, I immediately assume that the person who created it is stupid.

And then he apologizes:

I understand that this is a mistake on my part. They’re not necessarily totally stupid, they’re just stupid about apostrophes. It’s a moral failing on my part to conflate the two, but I bet I’m not the only one.

I’m sorry. I go with Seth’s first instinct. Call me elitist. But I get distracted by mistakes on basic grammar such as confusing its and it’s. Use apostrophes for plural nouns having nothing to do with possessives distracts me too. Like spinach showing in the smiling teeth.

The difference, I think, is that accents are much harder to unlearn and aren’t fundamentally correct or incorrect. Grammar is relatively easy to learn, and there is such a thing as correct and incorrect. I think making assumptions for Southern accents is dumb, but making assumptions for bad grammar, is less dumb.

Despite the apology, Seth ends up pretty much in the same place he started on grammar:

What else are your customers judging you on?

It’s not just about being a grammar stickler. The fact is, we’re constantly looking for clues and telling ourselves stories based on limited information. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.

I completely agree. I don’t want to be bigoted against certain accents, which is dumb. But I’m not going to give up on grammar.

I thought it was one of my better posts ever on Huffington, A Great Debate About Ideas, because it covered something really important — the battle of free vs. not — and tied Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and Ellen Goodman together.

But it wasn’t, it turns out, because of a dull deadline. Maybe I should have called it “The Battle of Free vs. Not.” Hmm, no, see, I’m not that good at headlines. “Naked idea orgy?”

1. Delete it
2. Start over
3. Make it a list of 10
4. Make it a list of 5
5. Insult somebody famous
6. Find a way to add one or more of the words “naked, brutal, violent, sexy, stripped, revealed, angry, face-off” … or something like that.
7. Blame it on the readers, the editors, or anybody else you can think of.
8. Take a walk, and think about a single sentence that would make you want to read the rest of the post.
9. Go browse a blog reader like Google reader set to show just headlines.
10. Go back to point 1 and go right down this list again.

True story: when I was young, working with UPI in Mexico City — we’re talking about early 1970s, so seriously, a long time ago — the system we used to report Mexico news to New York Editors showed them the first sentence only; from that, they had to decide whether or not they wanted to see the whole first paragraph. And, with that, they had to decide again (push a button) whether they wanted to see the rest of the story. So I should be able to do this.

And something else, that I’ve learned, in a lot of years writing: there are many different varieties of writing. Being good at one doesn’t mean you’re good at another. I used to think I was a good writer, but copy writers amaze me. And in newspapers, reporters don’t write the headlines. And writing and creative fiction plots are totally different skills.

Damn headlines.

I like Twitter and I use it a lot, but really, I don’t care if you do, or if anybody else does. And I don’t get why people seem offended by it, but they do, a lot. What’s up with that? Is it politics or religion? Defensiveness maybe?

For example, this rant appeared as a comment underneath my loving and hating Twitter post on Huffington Post:

Why should Twitter and tweets replace perfectly good ways to send the same information, or even more/better info? It seems to be like saying “the telephone is not good enough, we need to return to telegraph.” Why can’t we just send an email saying the same thing as a tweet, and the email recipient gets a “inbox from __” alert email? Why can’t the tweet be posted to FB’s “what I’m doing” box, or why can’t a blogger’s blog be where the post is posted, with a service that sends an email to followers that tells them a new post is available or repeats the post?

This new tech is redundant and does not improve the old model; instead it hamstrings it by limiting the text. Twitter just doesn’t make sense. Half the people who sign up for it right now are doing so because they want to see why all the comedy shows are mocking it.

In the end Twitter will become a national joke and then recede until it fails like so many other net companies. (Unless they change their business model and then they won’t be Twitter so much anymore but Facebook with less benefits.) However there is a new tech better than Twitter: it is called the telephone. You’ll never have to type a teletype again to communicate– save time, leave tweets on people’s phonemail… viola! I’ve heard this telephone thing saves time and trouble, why not try it?

What interests me is the apparent overreaction. That commenter doesn’t see the difference between publishing 140-character pieces to as many people as choose to get them, all at once, and a telephone call or an email. Obviously he or she doesn’t get Twitter. So why comment at all? The post doesn’t accuse non-Twitter-users of anything.

And another commenter wrote:

So it’s sort of like IMs. Which are an obnoxious, invasive interruption. I check my email compulsively, but IMs are like the person next to you on the plane who won’t shut up.

There again, since that person obviously doesn’t get it, why so much anxiety? I’m still shocked with this one. There’s somebody who should not have the instant messenger running on his or her computer, right?

Last week I took my Twitter etiquette list, which I put here on this blog first, and put it onto the Huffington Post. And somebody took the time to comment:

The mundane details of people’s lives are all Twitter is. That and spamming.

There again, somebody who obviously doesn’t get it, but cares a great deal about it nonetheless.

Not that any of this matters, but I’m just curious … is there some moral issue related to Twitter? Or political, maybe, or religious? What’s up with that?