SLOW BURN MARKETING
  • Home
  • Portfolio
    • Branding
    • Audio / Video
    • Print
    • Web
    • Collateral Etc.
  • About
    • Blaine Parker
    • Honey Parker
    • Testimonials
  • Services
    • Do You Fit?
  • Stuff
    • Speaking
    • Books
    • Newsletter
  • Story Lab
  • Contact

WORDS GOOD: Two Things, One Small & One Big-ish.

2/22/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
First of all, the small announcement. If you are a lover of pizza, and have always wanted to make your own, please join me over at www.FreeThePizza.com. It’s fun, and there’s a free chapter from the forthcoming Free The Pizza book that includes a free dough recipe. Just look for the button, “Free dough recipe.”

Now, word for today is, “Hiatus.” The word hiatus represents a gap. I hear about gaps, and the first two things I think of are 1) The Gap, a clothing store founded in 1969 selling only Levi’s jeans and LP records.

You would more likely know the grown version of this store as GAP, which looks nothing like its former self and is a company that also owns Banana Republic, a company which also looks nothing like its former self when it was selling funky safari and travel clothing to people whose lives had an enormous gap between themselves and safaris.

What’s nice about the word hiatus is its optimism. A gap always has something on the other side. More to come! A phrase made popular by the London Underground, “Mind the gap,” is a polite way of giving the order, “Watch your step.” And since you’re getting on a train, you’re going somewhere. Maybe it’s good, and you will be back.

Interestingly, the etymology of the word “hiatus” stems from 16th century Latin, and literally means “gaping.” As in, there’s a gaping hole in your resume during those three years when you stopped selling shoes Santa Monica and lived in a smelly, pseudo ashram in Pacoima. (“Pseudo” and “Pacoima,” two P-words that have nothing to do with each other in any way, including pronunciation of the “P.”)

A hiatus sounds more optimistic than anything that’s gaping. So that is what I am presenting to you today: your relentless scribe’s announcement of hiatus. Things are changing rapidly in our post-COVID lives. In order to serve you better, we will be closing the doors on Words Good for the time being. When we return, it will be Big.

In the meantime, feel free to ankle on over to Slow Burn Marketing’s new brand for all things related to homemade pizza at Free The Pizza dot com. You can get an occasional dose of wordy weirdness right there.

Thanks for playing!
Cheers,

Blaine Parker
Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City


LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON

The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the REDUCED bargain price of $9.95
 
For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!)
0 Comments

WORDS GOOD: Are you baffled when you look under the hood?

2/15/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Your relentless scribe was seeking the etymology of the word, “baffle.” As in, “I am baffled by that commercial where Matthew MaConaughey is coming down from airless space in a hot air balloon and yelling at everybody and wow, what a case of hat head he has.” (Seriously, Go back and look at it.)

And really, you could point to half a dozen commercials from yesterday’s Big Game and say, “What was THAT? I’m baffled!” However, I’m finding myself baffled by the etymology of the word “baffle” vis-à-vis, “to perplex.” Yes, one can draw inferences about how we got from the technical idea of bafflement to perplexity.

But we want a concrete and definitive answer here. So, as I’m scratching my head and perplexing over baffle and finding sudden joy in the word being an obsolete seaman’s term for "winds that blow variously, making headway difficult" (and boy have I been there, literally as well as metaphorically), I’ve stumbled upon another word that has often forced me to wonder, “Where does that come from?”

Hello, “Hoodwinked”! As in, “I’m feeling hoodwinked that my tax dollars were used to buy a spot in The Big Game to tell me to get fake vaccinated!” (No, I’m not an anti-vaxxer or a fake-newser, but someone out there is one or both, so it just seems fair to provide equal time as the federal government used to mandate that broadcasters do when delivering political messages. But I digress.)

Hoodwink! The meaning? To deceive! How topical that is in our culture of fake news during the Big Game in The Violent Hell That Is Now Los Angeles. I mean, who’s even sure the Tampa Bay Buccaneers actually won the game last night? No, you didn’t see them on the field. But people are talking about it. The alternate universe in which the Bengals won the game is a place rife with advocacy sports journalism and deadly blunt blather.

Blather! There’s a word we have to research. Well, no we don’t. It’s easy. It comes from the Old Norse, “blathara,” meaning to talk nonsense. Sometimes those Scandinavians get it right, the Saab 9-7X SUV built in Ohio notwithstanding. But all that and other nonsense aside, including those half a dozen head scratching “messages” from the Big Game Advertising Abyss of last night, where advertisers left you baffled if not feeling hoodwinked, you need (need!) to know that the word “hoodwink” hails from a different time altogether. Today, "hoodwink" is a laughable way of talking about a scam as if one is a Dead End Kid from a 1940s black & white movie.

Hoodwinking actually comes to us from the age of the highwaymen. And no, not the Scarlet Pimpernel kind of Hollywood movie highwaymen where there’s a guy who isn’t really a fop and isn’t really a bandit and a woman who’s disgusted by his foppish fake side yet lusts after his fake alter ego. No, you bet your bloomers not. We’re talking real, dangerous, rob you and possibly kill you as opposed to romancing you highwaymen.

And imagine my surprise! The word “Hoodwink” is a mashup (though they didn’t have that mashed-up term in the days of the highwaymen) of the words “hood” and “wink.” Insert GASP here!

The "hood" part is The Bag. The highwayman would put The Bag over your head so you could see neither his face nor what he was doing nor what advertiser he was doing it for. (For some reason, back then they always stitched the corporate logo over the left breast of the highwayman's dashing if impractical cape. Why?!)

The "wink" part is another headscratcher. That’s until you realize that back in the days of the highwaymen, when the highways were merely dirt doubletrack instead of the paved and crumbling coast-to-coast infrastructure dangerway networks we have now, the word “wink” meant something different.

Today, we see a wink as a closing of one eye to demonstrate complicity or a mutual secret. However, the obsolete meaning of “wink” is to literally close one’s eyes. Yes, both of 'em. So being hoodwinked means having one’s eyes effectively closed involuntarily by a bag over the head. (I’m hoping that bag was made of a coarse-weave fabric so as to facilitate breathing. Today, it could easily be a plastic bag from a big-box Big Game advertiser store and would kill you as soon as blow away and mercilessly pollute your fisheries. But again: I digress.)

So, the hoodwink, while today being seen as a somewhat dated word meaning to run a scam on someone, actually stems from a literal obstruction of one's vision via a hood. So if your bafflement over the blather of the adversphere of the Big Game was more than you bargained for, take solace in knowing that at least some things really are as simple as they seem and don’t require deep investigation, especially when they weren’t keeping you up at night to begin with. Now baffle my blather, baby!
Cheers,

Blaine Parker
Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City

 
LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON
The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the REDUCED bargain price of $9.95
 
For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!)
0 Comments

WORDS GOOD: That sound you hear is the ticking of the procrasticlock...

2/9/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Word: Procrastinate.

We use it all the time.

Do we really know what it means?

Here ya go. Strap in and hang on to your late 16th century Latin.

 
It literally means “deferred until morning.”
 
It comes from the verb procrastinare, derived from the prefix “pro,” meaning “forward,” and the word “crastinus” meaning “belonging to tomorrow.”

Break that latter word down a bit, and you find “cras” is the Latin word for “tomorrow.”

You getting this? There's more. Or shall we table it until morning? 
Cheers,

Blaine Parker
Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City

 
LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON
The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the REDUCED bargain price of $9.95
 
For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!)
0 Comments

WORDS GOOD: How Snarky Are You And Does It Cost You?

2/5/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Snark abounds. Is there a medical treatment for that?

A friend of mine has landed in the hospital. I’m feeling for him, and I’m also feeling remiss. For many weeks, I’ve been thinking I owe him a phone call to banter about life, the universe and everything.

Then, this happened. Among other things, he’s having trouble with his speech. And I’m sitting here, thinking, Wow. These are the moments where one castigates oneself for not being a better friend.

Come to find out, one of the things my buddy enjoys about our calls is the snarky tenor of the conversation. I’m humbled, as he is easily more skilled at snark than I. But that tidbit got me thinking about the word, “snarky.” What does it really mean? Is it a good thing? What is the etymology?

The first time I recall hearing the word in regard to myself was during my foray into standup comedy during the 1990s. I was alternately referred to as “snarky” and as a “poor man’s Dennis Miller.” The latter might be a snarky compliment, but I’m not sure. But I do know that my ailing friend’s hair is more like Dennis Miler’s 1990’s hair than my own ever was. Mine lacks the ability to bounce and behave like a 1960’s TV shampoo model. That notwithstanding, our respective levels of snark seem to be about even.

But anyway, the etymology of “snarky.” First, the word means “critical or mocking in an indirect or sarcastic way.” OK. Flattering. But it gets less so. “Bad tempered or irritable.”  Eegad. I don’t want to be that person. So, where does this all come from?

Root words for snarky date from the 1800s, including “nag,” and literally, “to snort.” Pht. But most interesting is the British slang word “narky,” from the earlier word “nark,” which means an “annoying, unpleasant or quarrelsome person.” And then, it gets even more unflattering.

“Nark” is a verb dating to 1859, meaning “to act as a police informer.” All of this probably comes from the Romany word “nak” for “nose.” Now, I’m no nark, a word I always assumed was a product of the 1960s hippie culture and was spelled “narc.” It’s not. I’m also pretty sure my friend is no nark, either. And the word is more likely related to the idea of sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.

And to become even more twisted, it may also have a similar root word in Sanskrit. That’s the language we usually associate with Nirvana (the state of being, not the grunge band) and attempting to attain true enlightenment. And the latter desire often has something to do with misguided Nirvana seekers and their controlled substances about whom one narks to the narcs, eh?

This is so complicated and unseemly. And all I know is I’m now questioning how much snarking I want to be known for, as it comes at a price. Sarcasm and its cousin, satire, are often misunderstood. But as an often misunderstood lawyer to whom I was recently speaking said, “Dude!” (Yes, he said “Dude!”) “Dude! We all grew up reading Mark Twain and Mad Magazine! This us what you get from us!”

There’s a reason The Fabulous Honey Parker and I have enjoyed working with lawyers at Slow Burn Marketing. They’re often smart people for whom snark abounds. But anyway, my being snarky is something my medically inconvenienced friend enjoys. So perhaps he’ll appreciate this snarky madness from his hospital bed.

And if you, faithful reader, have a new and useful perspective on things snarky that you find helpful in any way, well, that’s a bonus for me. Proud to serve. I look forward to seeing you further in the snarky ether, seeking true ill-tempered enlightenment at the ends of our Romany noses. 
Cheers,

Blaine Parker
Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City

 
LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON
The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the REDUCED bargain price of $9.95
 
For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!)
0 Comments
    Picture

    Author

    Blaine Parker is prone to ranting about any and all things related to brand. In many ways, he is a professional curmudgeon. While there is no known vaccine for this, the condition is also not contagious. Unless you choose it to be so. 

    Archives

    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015

    Categories

    All
    Abe Lincoln
    Advertising
    Advertising As Art
    Ad Writing
    Amazon
    Apathy
    Art And Advertising
    Attack Ads
    Authenticity
    Beat Bobby Flay
    Besotted
    Best Ads Of 2017
    Big Ideas
    Billboards
    Bobby Flay
    Book Marketing
    Brand Advertising
    Branding
    Branding Book
    Branding Santa Claus
    Brand Names
    Bud Light
    Budwieser
    Burger King
    Burger King Advertising
    Burning Man
    Burning Questions
    Business Book
    Buy Now
    Car Advertising
    Carefu;-ish
    Careful-ish
    Casablanca
    Christmas
    Commercials
    Commitment
    Communication
    Content
    Core Customer
    Corny
    Corporate Culture
    CoupleCo
    Couplepreneurs
    COVID 19
    COVID-19
    Crazy Ivan
    Creativity
    Creativity Over Message
    Cult Brands
    Customers
    David Ogilvy
    Dick Orkin
    Diisruptive
    Down Market
    Dr Sam's Eye Care
    Effectivness
    Electronics
    Entrenched
    Exceeding Expectaion
    Facebook Advertising
    Feeling
    Focus
    Focus Grouping
    Fonts
    Food
    Fraud
    Gary Vaynerchuk
    Hair Club For Men
    Hanukkah
    Holidays
    Hotels
    Hugo Boss
    Hurricane Relief
    Ideas
    Influence
    Inspiration
    Internet Radio
    Jeep
    Jerry Lewis
    Johnnie Walker
    Jungles
    Krylon Spray Paint
    Lawyers
    Lightning Branding
    Logos
    Lulu Lemon
    Mackerel
    Make Customers Care
    Marketing
    Masks
    Meaning
    Media
    Medical Tourism
    Membership
    Me Too
    Millennials
    Milton Glaser
    Must See TV
    Napa
    Nastalgia
    New Clients
    New Skills
    New Years
    Nicaragua
    Niche Brands
    Offers
    Ogilvy On Advertising
    Outdoor
    Pasta
    Patriotism
    Pen & Paper
    Personal Brand
    Pizza
    Podcasts
    Poetry
    Point Of Purchase
    Political Advertising
    Political Correctness
    Price Advertising
    Pringles
    Procrastination
    Product Experience
    Publicity Stunts
    Punctuation
    Puppy Monkey Baby
    Radio
    Reader Question
    Reality TV
    Relationship Marketing
    Repeat Customers
    Research
    Rhode Island Tourism
    Road Trip
    Romance
    Rosser Reeves
    Sailing
    Sales Staff Writing Radio
    SEO
    Small Business
    Small Business Branding
    SnapChat
    Social Media
    Social Media Marketing
    State Farm
    Story
    Struggling
    Subaru
    Super
    Superbowl
    Super Bowl Ads
    Sushi
    Sy Sperlling
    Taglines
    Thanksgiving
    The Big Short
    Trademarks
    USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
    Vail
    Velcro
    Vernacular
    Vocabulary
    Wine
    Words Good
    Writing
    Writing Advertising
    Zeitgeist

    RSS Feed

OFFERING:
Branding & Marketing
Speaking
Books
Newsletter


INFO:
Services Breakdown
​
Clients
About
Testimonials
Contact
STORY LAB
Picture
​
​
© Copyright 2020 Slow Burn Marketing LLC
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
Picture
  • Home
  • Portfolio
    • Branding
    • Audio / Video
    • Print
    • Web
    • Collateral Etc.
  • About
    • Blaine Parker
    • Honey Parker
    • Testimonials
  • Services
    • Do You Fit?
  • Stuff
    • Speaking
    • Books
    • Newsletter
  • Story Lab
  • Contact