When Change is Good
According to an article in the New York Times (February 29, 2008), “more than one in 100 American adults are behind bars.” It sometimes seems like our legislators are hellbent on turning us into a nation of jailbirds.
Rocket scientists, alas, are a much rarer species. This can have embarrassing consequences for those of us who make a living as writers, as I discovered to my chagrin back in January 2002.
Back then I was lead writer for the hardware product marketing websites at Apple. I’d written a page for the PowerBook G4 that extolled, among other things, its quantum increase in processing power.
This was ignorance on my part. My lapse apparently amused a fellow named Lars at Mathematica, and he sent someone he knew at Apple an email.
Here’s what the snippet that was passed on to me said: “Could someone please teach the guys at Apple elementary physics? A quantum is the smallest possible energy increment. So they just pulled the most minimal increase in processing power possible.”
Oops. Lars was right, of course. My bad.
Now in case you don’t know it, besides making you feel like a dolt, emails that point out mistakes in product marketing copy can create panic at some companies.
Depending on who you work for, the typical knee-jerk overreaction could range from emergency meetings to reprimands from editors, or — in extreme cases — a hysterical outburst from the Chicken Little head of corporate PR, whose team has been fully mobilized and placed on red alert.
But Apple is a different kind of company. Our product marketing managers, bless them, were aware that web copy isn’t set in stone and can be changed in an instant. The phrase “quantum increase” was changed to “quantum leap,” and the PowerBook went on selling like the proverbial hotcakes.
My point is that until Lars showed me the error of my ways, idiots like myself (and I’m not alone), thought a quantum increase meant a huge increase. That’s because most of us don’t learn the meanings of words and phrases from a dictionary.
We get a sense of meaning from context. This works pretty good for the most part, but there are times when the sound or tone of some words or phrases may suggest a completely different or even opposite meaning.
For example, when people say things like, “Debbie is gung ho to get started,” they’re using gung ho to mean the person has a can-do attitude or is highly motivated to do something.
Fact is, gung ho was originally Chinese for work together. It was introduced into the American lexicon in 1942 by Evans Fordyce Carlson, an old China hand who made gung ho (as in work together) the motto of the 2nd Marine Raider battalion.
But the sound of gung ho (and maybe also its initial association with Carlson’s Raiders) suggested an entirely different meaning. And that is the meaning it has today in popular usage.
In The Problem of Style, a collection of lectures delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1922, John Middleton Murry noted how popular usage sets in motion the process he called smoothing the coinage of language.
Popular usage can change what a word means, so that over time some words and phrases can even take on the meaning of their antonyms.
Watch the news anchors on television and sooner or later you’ll hear one of them talking earnestly about towns that have been “decimated,” obviously intending to convey the news that the population in said towns had been wiped out almost to the last man.
As it happens, the word decimate is derived from the Latin decimare, meaning to take a tenth part from. The strict definition used to be, to kill one in every ten of. But decimate sounds like it means a total massacre, and that’s the way it is most frequently used.
Many dictionaries have bowed to popular usage and list two definitions of the word decimate: to destroy and kill a large proportion of, as well as its original meaning (to kill one in every ten of).
Speaking for myself, I’m not inclined to be stampeded by the objections of a pedantic person. The history of language shows that in any dispute over proper usage, the vernacular wins every time. But when you’re dead wrong, as I was with my PowerBook copy, the best thing to do is correct your mistake and enjoy the rest of your life. Because when you indulge yourself as a writer and allow your copy to stray too far ahead of popular usage, the ad itself could become an issue and a distraction.
Few people reading this are likely to recall the line Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. There was an outcry from academe when it first appeared. Sticklers for grammar professed outrage at Young & Rubicam for its lapse in using “like” instead of “as.” But Y&R’s copy chief George Gribbin stood his ground; that was the way most people spoke, he said, and he was right.
The moral of the story? Change is good — sometimes, anyway.
Copyright © 2008 The Graham Agency. All rights reserved.
Rocket scientists, alas, are a much rarer species. This can have embarrassing consequences for those of us who make a living as writers, as I discovered to my chagrin back in January 2002.
Back then I was lead writer for the hardware product marketing websites at Apple. I’d written a page for the PowerBook G4 that extolled, among other things, its quantum increase in processing power.
This was ignorance on my part. My lapse apparently amused a fellow named Lars at Mathematica, and he sent someone he knew at Apple an email.
Here’s what the snippet that was passed on to me said: “Could someone please teach the guys at Apple elementary physics? A quantum is the smallest possible energy increment. So they just pulled the most minimal increase in processing power possible.”
Oops. Lars was right, of course. My bad.
Now in case you don’t know it, besides making you feel like a dolt, emails that point out mistakes in product marketing copy can create panic at some companies.
Depending on who you work for, the typical knee-jerk overreaction could range from emergency meetings to reprimands from editors, or — in extreme cases — a hysterical outburst from the Chicken Little head of corporate PR, whose team has been fully mobilized and placed on red alert.
But Apple is a different kind of company. Our product marketing managers, bless them, were aware that web copy isn’t set in stone and can be changed in an instant. The phrase “quantum increase” was changed to “quantum leap,” and the PowerBook went on selling like the proverbial hotcakes.
My point is that until Lars showed me the error of my ways, idiots like myself (and I’m not alone), thought a quantum increase meant a huge increase. That’s because most of us don’t learn the meanings of words and phrases from a dictionary.
We get a sense of meaning from context. This works pretty good for the most part, but there are times when the sound or tone of some words or phrases may suggest a completely different or even opposite meaning.
For example, when people say things like, “Debbie is gung ho to get started,” they’re using gung ho to mean the person has a can-do attitude or is highly motivated to do something.
Fact is, gung ho was originally Chinese for work together. It was introduced into the American lexicon in 1942 by Evans Fordyce Carlson, an old China hand who made gung ho (as in work together) the motto of the 2nd Marine Raider battalion.
But the sound of gung ho (and maybe also its initial association with Carlson’s Raiders) suggested an entirely different meaning. And that is the meaning it has today in popular usage.
In The Problem of Style, a collection of lectures delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1922, John Middleton Murry noted how popular usage sets in motion the process he called smoothing the coinage of language.
Popular usage can change what a word means, so that over time some words and phrases can even take on the meaning of their antonyms.
Watch the news anchors on television and sooner or later you’ll hear one of them talking earnestly about towns that have been “decimated,” obviously intending to convey the news that the population in said towns had been wiped out almost to the last man.
As it happens, the word decimate is derived from the Latin decimare, meaning to take a tenth part from. The strict definition used to be, to kill one in every ten of. But decimate sounds like it means a total massacre, and that’s the way it is most frequently used.
Many dictionaries have bowed to popular usage and list two definitions of the word decimate: to destroy and kill a large proportion of, as well as its original meaning (to kill one in every ten of).
Speaking for myself, I’m not inclined to be stampeded by the objections of a pedantic person. The history of language shows that in any dispute over proper usage, the vernacular wins every time. But when you’re dead wrong, as I was with my PowerBook copy, the best thing to do is correct your mistake and enjoy the rest of your life. Because when you indulge yourself as a writer and allow your copy to stray too far ahead of popular usage, the ad itself could become an issue and a distraction.
Few people reading this are likely to recall the line Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. There was an outcry from academe when it first appeared. Sticklers for grammar professed outrage at Young & Rubicam for its lapse in using “like” instead of “as.” But Y&R’s copy chief George Gribbin stood his ground; that was the way most people spoke, he said, and he was right.
The moral of the story? Change is good — sometimes, anyway.
Copyright © 2008 The Graham Agency. All rights reserved.
Labels: advertising, apple, brasenose college oxford, evans fordyce carlson, george gribbin, john middleton murry, mathematica, new york times, oxford university, powerbook g4, winston, young and rubicam
posted by graham at
6:32 PM
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