'On Language' Archive
‘Wordcraft’ details birth of brand names, semantics of ‘berries’
Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
There is a moment every marketer both dreams of and fears. It is the time when a brand name, by decree of the dictionary or whims of the zeitgeist, becomes a common noun or a verb. This can be a blessing — the ultimate validation of a name that is both catchy and meaningful. But it can also be a curse. The more widely a word is used, the harder it is to legally protect as a trademark. So we “xerox” a memo, “fed-ex” a package or “google” a blind date, to the chagrin of squads of copyright attorneys in corporate headquarters.
In a brand name’s infancy, however, the thought of gaining this kind of cultural currency is an inspiration to professional namers, says Alex Frankel in his new book Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words Into Big Business (Crown, $24.95).
Business school emphasizes a ‘values-based’ curriculum
Thursday, April 22nd, 2004
The Loyola University Graduate School of Business has new billboards around town that read, “We educate values-based leaders.”
As timely as the tagline is in this era of Enron/Tyco corporate scandal, it raises one question: What exactly is a values-based leader?
“Most business schools do an effective job educating students about the technical aspects of business—debits, credits, [...]
‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ takes on poor punctuation
Thursday, April 8th, 2004
Centuries ago, the word “stickler” meant the judge of a duel who made sure all the rules were obeyed. To author Lynne Truss, those were the good old days. At least people listened to that kind of stickler.
…
Truss has tried to change that with her book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” which became an unexpected best seller in Britain and will be released in North America
Linguists hunt and study words in their natural habitat
Thursday, March 25th, 2004
Sometimes language lovers sound as if they’re on a safari. They talk about observing words in their natural habitat and studying their behavior in herds.
With the first release of the American National Corpus, an annotated body of over 10 million words, linguists can hunt like never before.
Once again without feeling: Athletic cliches a team effort
Thursday, March 18th, 2004
it’s the season of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and, as they inevitably say, you can throw the records out the window. And the mathematics. Over the next three weeks, in pregame pep talks and postgame press conferences, players and coaches will repeatedly make the math-defying pledge to give 110 percent and offer up boundless other basketball banalities.
“If anybody watches 10 seconds of sports on TV or reads anything between quotation marks in the paper, it’s almost all cliches,” says Steve Rushin, who writes the weekly “Air and Space” column for Sports Illustrated. “We all know those ready-made phrases so well you can almost predict them before they come out of someone’s mouth: `It was a team effort; we gave 110 percent.’”
In 2000, Rushin wrote a column composed entirely of cliches (deliberately, he hastens to note).
’60s American culture altered communication
Thursday, March 11th, 2004
When did the term “rhetoric” become an insult? When did the word cease to mean artfully crafted speech and start to convey scorn, as it does when we hear a campaign speech and mutter, “That’s just rhetoric”?
The answer is 1965, says John McWhorter in his recent book, “Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language [...]
The Jesuit Scholar Who Translated ‘The Passion’
Thursday, March 4th, 2004
Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the
Christ” is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last week’s debut
marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North America. …
“I got a call while I was in Jerusalem: ‘Hey, Padre, It’s Mel, I
got a job for you,’” Fulco said. “I said, `Mel who?’ We talked for
about an hour. He told me about the project, and I couldn’t pass it
up.”
In 2002, Gibson gave Fulco the script written by Benedict
Fitzgerald, mostly derived from the Gospels, and asked Fulco to
translate it into Aramaic , Hebrew and Latin. Fulco later translated
the script back into English subtitles.
‘Sex and the City’ redefined the way women talk on TV
Thursday, February 26th, 2004
As “Sex and the City” reached its series finale Sunday, eulogists duly examined the mark it made on popular culture, from its snazzy shoes and outfits to its portrayal of single women. But few paused to note another aspect of the show’s legacy: its language.
Its adult language, to be exact.
If “fabulous” was one of the most recurring words on the show, so was a shorter word beginning with the same letter.
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