Now that the holidays are officially upon us, what with the floodgates of Thanksgiving fully opened and allowing us to be excessive in all things related to familial celebrations, it seems a good time to unwrap the gift of a good word that doesn’t get to trot its stuff as often as it should.
We’re speaking, of course, of that wobbly kneed adjective born of the less-popular middle-English transitive verb, “Besotted.” Yes, perhaps your head is saying to you, “Oh. That. We remember that, don’t we? Ouch.” Or, perhaps your don’t remember due to an excess of besotment. UFO conspiracy theorists call it “lost time” and blame it on abduction by aliens. It can happen this time of year. (Besotment, that is. Alien abductions, less so.) Somewhere between the turkey and the football, somewhat more alcohol is served than is advisable, and someone among your party not you weaves across the floor to your position, grabs you around the neck with his arm and begins blubbering into your shoulder, “Love ya, man!” Here's the enjoyable irony of that little vignette. “Besotted,” which is commonly construed to mean alcohol intoxication, comes from a different etymological root: it means “infatuated” or being made to appear foolish or stupid because of infatuation. The prefix “be-” represents being caused to be something, and the wet, heavy root word “sot” lands with splat, coming from the equally heavy and wet sounding middle-English noun “sott,” meaning “fool.” So, the inebriant who is besotted by drink and hooks you around the neck to serve a heaping helping of “Love ya, man!” upon your person is also besotted by his love for you despite the fact that you married his sister and owe him money. (Though, not for marrying his sister. The money was for an altogether different transaction.) In fact, the earliest known use of the word “besotted” is in a poem from 1597 in which the narrator is head over heels infatuated with a stranger and describes himself as so foolishly “besotted” that he’s like the guy who was cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs enough to get busy with Clytemnestra while Agamemnon was at war. Sorry, was that too arcane? Forgive me. I’m no scholar of Greek literature. I merely know enough classical references to appear boorish at cocktail parties whilst upon the road to besotment. Anyway! As the post-pandemic holiday season gets into full swing and the fools among us continue to get themselves thrown off of commercial airliners for violations of decorum that bring into question their mental health, enjoy your favorite intoxicant in moderation, whether it be sugar, sweet emotion, or that fallback beverage of the classical texts, wine. And please do so in moderation so that when you’re asked how the office holiday party was, you can cheerfully reply, “They were a besotted lot” with no reference to yourself, either as an inebriant or as an overly emotive fool for the holiday. Gobble. 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!)
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Careful. Copy.
Words fail me. I don’t know what to say. So I’m just going to blurt it out. “Avoid diabetic amputations without surgery.” That is what the copy says. On a billboard. A giant billboard along an interstate highway. How did that headline get past everyone involved in a multi-thousand dollar media purchase? “Avoid life-changing disfigurement without cutting off your leg!” “Avoid doing without doing!” It’s so bad, it’s almost like a Zen koan. If a tree surgeon is amputating in the woods and no patient is there to be cut, does the limb make a sound? And what is the sound of one hand slapping the advertiser? Here’s the problem: there IS something important in the thinking behind the headline. But you wouldn’t know it from the inept wording. If you’re going to lose a foot or a leg to diabetes, you might already know there are surgical alternatives to amputation. There’s also a NON-surgical alternative to amputation. But to say, “Avoid doing by not doing” is a construct destined to fail because it spins the head around. How about, “No amputation AND no surgery!” That’s not great, but it’s better. “The non-surgical alternative to diabetic amputation.” That’s more clear, though not catchy. “Can a simple injection save you from diabetic amputation?” For the moment, that’s the headline I’m choosing. If I think more about it, maybe I can make it better. Backstory: I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a couple of months. I saw that billboard somewhere in Virginia about 10 weeks ago. It’s been nagging at me ever since. I tried googling the headline to no avail. Then, I thought about what the headline was really trying to say. If I’m avoiding without doing, what is it that I’m NOT doing? I finally searched for “surgical alternatives to amputation.” Lo and behold: there are surgical alternatives to diabetic amputation. They’re also often ineffective and problematic. Which is why some guy with a biomedical engineering background came up with an injection treatment as an alternative. That alternative treatment works better than surgery. It also helps avoid amputation. (Yes, I "researched" in all of three minutes. Peer reviewed by me!) Is that injection procedure what we’re selling here? I dunno. But it makes sense. Because it represents the right form of avoiding without doing. Is it possible the prospect will understand the original headline on the billboard? Yes. Is it more likely the prospect will be as confused as I was? Yes. When you’re driving past a billboard at 70 miles an hour and are told to avoid something without doing something else, you don’t have time to process that message and figure it out. It’s a complicated and unclear construction. A billboard needs words good and simple. Heck, not just billboards. Most written thoughts can benefit from good and simple. Gymnastics are not conducive to clarity. Clear up what you’re saying and you’ll sell more. Maybe an easier way to think of this is: your writing is entering into a conversation the prospect is already having. Speak to that prospect in words that sound like his or her conversation. All it takes is the time required to make it shorter, make it sweeter, and make it sing. Words good. And simple. 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!) Period! Bam!
So glad that folks were enjoying last week’s screeding about activating your wording by getting it singing with the -ing ending. (Is that sentence ridiculousing enough?) If you missed that tale, your relentless scribe was in Mexico, consulting with a craft brewer. We’ve been talking with them about branding and marketing, which includes reviewing their business plan. Last week, we talked about giving business writing more zip by giving the words more action. (Actionizing them?) Today, we’re going to be decomplexing things. It sounds a little like decomposing, doesn’t it? Maybe it is. If one is composing sentences, and we’re talking about making them shorter, maybe we can talk about decomposing them. But I’m not going to go there. The bottom line here is that periods are your friend. Are you making your reader climb a mountain? Or are you putting the reader on greased rails? One of the most common challenges in business writing is complex sentences that need not be complex. They can slow things down. Please don’t misunderstand me. Complex sentences have their place. But here, we’re selling. Simplicity is one key to keeping the reader engaged. We need to keep the pace brisk. We should be developing an appropriate level of excitement or energy with no speed bumps. (By the way, before editing it, the preceding four sentences was one single sentence of 30 words. Doctor heal thyself. Word!) When we require action, sentences that are unnecessarily complex get in the way. Run! Gosh, that is one of my favorite sentences. On the face of it, it seems incomplete. But it has a subject: you, implied. And it has a predicate, the part of the sentence containing a verb and saying something about the subject. Yes, predicates are something that we all forgot about the second we closed our grammar books in grade school. And knowing what they’re called really doesn’t matter so much here. The point here is efficiency. And that simple, one-word sentence says so much and suggests so much more. Rarely will we get such a simple sentence in business writing. But allowing the reader to run with your words is a matter of following a simple rule. The rule was best laid down by David Ogilvy: write no sentence longer than 13 words. Once you get longer and more complex, the reader has to think too hard. Here’s an example of a complex sentence in the business plan. And again, I remind you that the man who wrote this is a good writer and smarter than I ever will be. (His freshman year in college, he was reading The Odyssey in Greek. My freshman year, I was watching TV.) The original sentence… “Craft brewers among themselves are generally more collaborative than competitive, so the only real competitors for the craft brewer in Mexico are the brewery duopoly of Cuautémoc Moctezuma (now owned by Heineken) and Grupo Modelo (owned by AB InBev).” It’s actually a good sentence. But it’s complex. And I’m conditioned to bring a big box of periods to every encounter. “Craft brewers among themselves are generally more collaborative than competitive. [PERIOD] The only real competitors for the craft brewer in Mexico are the brewery duopoly of Cuautémoc Moctezuma (now owned by Heineken) and Grupo Modelo (owned by AB InBev).” That’s better. But it feels like we can give it more grease. Ready? “Craft brewers among themselves are generally more collaborative than competitive. The real competitor for the craft brewer in Mexico is a giant duopoly: Cuautémoc Moctezuma (owned by Heineken) and Grupo Modelo (owned by AB inBev).” We got rid of some qualifiers. “Real” modifying “competitors” has said goodbye. The word “now” explaining Heineken’s ownership seems to be along for the ride. Either Heineken owns it or they don’t. We’ve also put the word “giant” in place of “brewery” when describing the duopoly. Brewing is implicit in the concept of competition, and gaintism makes them feel more intimidating. And we’ve added a mark that puts the punch in punctuation: the colon. (See what I did there?) The colon doesn’t create a new sentence, but it feels like one. The colon says, “Note what follows!” So you get the effect of a full stop, and you also get the bonus of pointing to the next clause without actually standing there with your finger out. And instead of one long sentence with 39 words? We get 34 words that read like three quick sentences. This works everywhere, even in writing radio copy. The quicker the sentences, the more punch you can put in your sell. Greased rails for your reader--even when your reader is speaking the words aloud. Words good. Grease ‘em up. 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!) In the gray, pre-dawn here on Gulf coast, I’ve taken to my chair to scribe a rant just for you.
And then, change. Abrupt. I was putting pen to Moleskine knock-off and sipping the remains of yesterday’s French press coffee reheated (a glamorous life or what?) when the morning quiet was choked awake by strangled notes of every military man’s favorite piece of music. Yes, we’re talking “Reveille.” It’s pronounced, “REV-ah-lee,” though that is clearly not what the letters spell for English speakers. Doesn’t it look more like it should be pronounced “Re-vile”? Nearby, we have is a military base. Each morning at 6am, “Reveille” sounds over the base PA speakers. We can hear it out here on the other side of the gate. And know that I don’t use the word “strangled” lightly. Maybe it sounds better and less reviled inside the gate. Out in the land those men and women are working to keep free, here outside the gate and inside the house, that song is a garbled mess of harsh sonority, a crush of cruel notes assembled for your waking displeasure. So, what’s in a word? What is the goodness of “Reveille”? Let’s start with the obvious. It’s French. For some, that’s reason enough to hate “Reveille.” And it seems that “Reveille” is indeed hated by military personnel, something in which Irving Berlin took inspiration. (More on that later.) “Hate” is a strong word. However, I was never in the military nor woken by “Reveille.” The closest I came to military-ish service was standing watch on ocean-going sailboats, and the word “hate” is usable for the moment any hour of the night when you’re woken from your warm bunk to put on cold, wet clothes and go stand out in driving ran and crashing waves for three hours as you move (one hopes) ever closer to your destination across the pond. But, as the French might say, Je digresse. The word “Reveille” originates from the Latin “vigilare” or “keep watch,” and the subsequent French verb, “revéiller,” to wake, which brings us the French command “revéillez!” or “wake up!” There are different military calls to wakefulness that are misnamed as “Reveille.” Both the British Army Cavalry and the Royal Horse Artillery (shouldn’t firing horses from cannons be considered inhumane?) both use a tune called “The Rouse,” which is often misidentified as “Reveille.” My personal fave is that the Scottish Regiments of the British Army sound bagpipes (which in the estimation of those who “hate” bagpipes should be sufficient to wake the dead under any circumstances) in a call entitled “The Rouse,” but set to the tune of “Hey, Johnny Cope, Are Ye Waking Yet?” I doubt the regiments play the upbeat, British music hall version “Hey, Johnny” that I’ve heard. But it is fun to imagine a bunch of cranky, uniformed Scots dancing a jig into their morning. But what if one has neither bugle and bugler nor (thank God) pipes and piper? If a military unit lacks the personnel or equipment to play “Reveille,” it falls to some poor bastard to walk around, sticking his head inside everyone’s tent shouting the word, “REVEILLE!” He does this until everyone wakes up and (presumably) douses him with hot coffee. (I have this not from personal experience but a wiki source, so if your personal military experience proves different, feel free to report me to the CO.) And now, the words. There are no official words, good or otherwise, to “Reveille.” There are some unofficial words heard in boys’ locker rooms. Then, there are some words commonly heard among the military folks who’ve learned to enjoy the “hated” morning call to wake. For example, the British Infantry likes to sing, “Get out of bed, get out of bed you lazy bastards.” The British infantry prefer instructions to “Scrub the bloody muck out of your eyes.” The Royal Navy is much kinder (kindness being something at which the military excels): “Wakey, wakey, lash up and stow!” The common US words are perhaps the least good: “I can’t get ‘em up, I can’t get ‘em up, I can’t get ‘em up this morning!” There are alternate US versions which insult, alternately, enlisted men, non-coms, commissioned officers, and (of course) the bugler. But the goodest of all words to “Reveille” are those penned by Irving Berlin (who in 1918 was certainly using a pen). Switching the time signature from military 2:4 to a swinging 6:8, Berlin wrote: “Some day I’m going to murder the bugler/Some day they’re going to find him dead/I’ll amputate his Reveille and step upon it heavily/and spend the rest of my life in bed.” Berlin wrote this because of what he perceived as a universal hatred of “Reveille” among military men. I will again propose that “hatred” is perhaps overstating the case, at least insofar as heavily armed military organizations are never founded on love. And they can muster genuine hatred for the enemy. Anyway, hope all this helps you climb into your day. Words good. “Reveille” cruel. (But in a necessary, keeping-the-world-safe-for-words kinda way.) 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!) Unleash The Snark!
How shall I phrase this? I’ve been to the mountaintop? Mmmm… no. It was Minnesota. No mountains. Have I been to the Promised Land? It’s Minnesota. Some may see it that way. But I think I may just have to fall back onto a well-used Hollywood cliché… I’ve been to see the wizard. In this case, the wizard is a St. Paul-based poet entrepreneur (poetpreneur?) with an extraordinary track record in business of telling people things they don’t want to hear. That man is Dan Hill. A former academic with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing/Poetry, and a PhD in English, Dan Hill is the world-renowned master of facial coding, which he performs with his company Sensory Logic. What is facial coding? Let’s call it measuring human emotions through facial expressions in order to understand people’s reactions to various input. (That input can include advertising, even radio commercials.) Dan’s system for judging human emotional reactions through facial cues has put all kinds of businesses on his client list at Sensory Logic. That includes more than 100 of the world’s top 100 advertisers. His groundbreaking book, Emotionomics, has been an Advertising Age Top 100 must-read book for the year, and has been translated into a dozen or so languages. Dan Hill is a certified smart guy. So why is he seeing me? Hello, shameless self promotion! Dan and I were introduced by the great Jerry Lee, legendary radio station owner, President of SpotQ Services (for which I’ve done some consulting), crime prevention philanthropist, and all-around extraordinary human being. (Jerry Lee was knighted by the King of Sweden. I mean…how did I end up in such illustrious company?) Dan was writing a book and was looking for contributors. He talked to Jerry Lee, and yours truly somehow ended up on the shortlist. That’s how your relentless scribe became a contributor to Dan’s first satirical business book. It’s called Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide To Office Lingo. This book is created in the vein of so many classic works, ranging from Henry Beard’s The Sailor’s Dictionary (a personal fave) to The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce (deemed one of The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature, and Dan’s inspiration for this volume). Blah, Blah, Blah is funny, it’s biting, and it’s something unexpected. It’s a public service. The idea for Blah, Blah, Blah developed when Dan was having conversations with important business types who each told him, separately, that about 25% of corporate managers are bullies. This idea seems reflected in the book’s dedication: “This book is dedicated 100% to the wonderful people we’ve known on the job, and 10% to treacherous people who made writing this book so cathartic.” Dan told me he thought of turning to satire as an effort to encourage reforms in the workplace. The resulting book is funny enough that it has received genuine, out-loud laughter from The Fabulous Honey Parker. (If you know anything about comedians and comedy writers—both groups to which Honey belongs—getting them to laugh at all is a project. They’re always analyzing the jokes, and they’ve heard more jokes, good and bad, than normal, healthy people.) Here now, a few Blah, Blah, Blah definitions that passed the Honey Test… TALENT: The assumption that corporate life reaches Hollywood standards, when it’s really more like Vaudeville. ANTICIPATION: The naïveté that precedes Anticipointment. THOUGHT LEADER: A person who possesses neither any original thought nor the propensity to lead. SEXUAL INNUENDOS AND HARASSMENT: While innuendos involve pointless body-part references that belong in a bedroom, not a conference room, harassment may become the catalyst for mandatory training whereby (some) male employees learn that “harass” isn’t actually two separate words. BORDERLINE DECISIONS: What leaders with borderline personalities do best. I confess, that latter definition is mine. Accordingly, I’m honored to have moved the needle on The Fabulous Honey Parker’s Laugh-O-Meter. Anyway, all this to say, Dan’s business is fascinating. And his new book is funny. Feel free to buy it here. If you read this as text only or your links are disabled, copy and paste https://www.amazon.com/Blah-Snarky-Guide-Office-Lingo-ebook/dp/B09BWPQGGJ It’s available in Kindle and Paperback. I have both. I recommend paperback for the full and fun, book-like effect. And I get paid not one thin dime for any of this. No fat dimes, either. For me, as a writer who has had to battle corporate jargon in daily life, it’s just about knowing that this effort at sanity and public service is out there, chipping away at the deeply ensconced criminality of intellectually illicit institutionalized lingo. Also, when you read Dan’s preface, you’ll find a link to bonus material. So there ya go. No hard sell on this one. It’s just good work by a good man whom I admire, and I’m honored to have been part of it. (Thanks for the referral, Jerry Lee. And thank you loyal reader Rod Schwartz of Radio Sales Café for the invaluable introduction to Jerry Lee.) 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!) Perfectly good words are going bad before our eyes.
Yours truly has been called on the carpet for a usage that crosses invisible lines, raises hoary hackles, sends soaring raptors into tailspins, and makes innocent babies cry. Your relentless scribe is struggling this morning with a lexical problem that kept him up much of the night. And no, the problem is not that I’m referring to myself in the third person again. This all began with one word I will not repeat here. I’m not going to make that mistake in a public forum and risk being shouted down by the vocal minority that can ruin what remains of my career below the radar. This now unacceptable word has a literal counterpart that IS acceptable because it has roots that are more casual and less clinical sounding, its etymology more English and less Latin. Word A means exactly the same thing as Word B. Yet, Word A is banned—BANNED—for no clear reason other than a certain group representing a tiny fraction of less than 1% of the population deems it incorrect. It seems that this happened many years ago while I was not watching the newswire for intel on this tiny fraction of the population. I did not get the memo. Last night, when I was taken to task by a lovely 20-something for using Word A (which I believed to be innocuous), I was unapologetic. Again, since I did not receive the memo, I believed the Latin roots I was uttering were innocent of malice. Oh, no sirree bob. This morning, bleary-eyed over my coffee, suffering the lingering effects of the low-grade, overnight haunting of vocabularic ghosts, I investigated my transgression. Indeed, Word A had fallen from favor with the group from which I had learned it. It has indeed been shunted aside for Word B, its more prosaic counterpart. BUT… Word A is now being embraced anew by an even smaller subset of the original tiny fraction of the population because they see it as more appropriate. They can use it, but we can’t. So now, we’ve ended up with a perfectly good word gone bad that can be used as good by only a sliver of the self-annointed elite and if one of us in the great unwashed use it, we are to be scorned, possibly stoned, our garments rent and our flesh scourged. Does anyone besides me see the crime against language? We’re not talking profanities or racial slurs here. We’re talking about a word that refers to a manner of dress. It is a descriptive recognition of an elective condition that is neither pejorative or judgmental. It’s as if I’ve said, “Ah, you’re wearing green,” and was slapped down, the slapper saying, “We don’t use that word. We say ‘vert.’” “Vert? That’s French for ‘green.’ It means the same thing.” “Too bad. ‘Vert’ in. ‘Green’ out.” “Does it matter that you’re now using a masculine adjective, where the feminine counterpart would be ‘verte’? How does that impact all of this?” “You’re the spawn of Satan. We’re going to shout you down on social media.” Rewind to New Orleans, where I was recently at the World War II museum. Yes, it was New Orleans and no, I was neither drinking nor dancing. I was sober and seated. I was watching a multimedia presentation about the war. It painted a fascinating portrait of the banding together of people nationwide to defeat a common enemy. About halfway through it, I began thinking that if WW II happened today, we would never be able to pull it off. To paraphrase Walt Kelly’s famous quote from the Pogo comic strip… We have met the enemy and he is us using our own language. Today, we could never make it past the insanity of parsing words that go in and out of fashion like the violently shifting winds of the derecho climatology deep in the heartland of the United States, flinging unanchored mobile homes and splintering old barns with the violent and epic gracelessness of Zeus on a bender. (Oh. Sorry. Zeus. Cultural appropriation. And possibly dismissive of people who live in mobile homes.) In our present climate, overarching ideas are subjugated to intense prosecutions of minor vocabulary violations that carry no insidious intent, but pollute an entire message like a stink bomb at a gallery opening. There’s a conservative pundit who likes to say that the US has become an unserious nation. I disagree. What we’ve become is a nation entirely too serious about the wrong things. At best, it makes us laughable. It’s only a matter of time before a different, tough, humorless, dangerous nation eats our lunch. Or maybe we fall on our own inability to tolerate each other. Or both. I hope I’m wrong. Words good. Gone bad. 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 bargain price of $19.95 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!) I AM FILLED WITH GRIEF.
Well, perhaps that’s an overstatement. I am experiencing a modicum of grief. Hmm. Maybe that’s dancing around it. The words are a little cold. I’m bummed because I killed another one. Well, at least that reads like my words. Words that flowed from my own pen. Are these words good? Hard to know. But let’s look at where we are and what has transpired to inspire this muddled meditation on a minimal manifestation. You know what’s dead? Another Moleskine notebook. It was a gift from my long-suffering wife (she’s married to yours truly after all), along with the rather nice pen with which I’m scribbling these words into a newer, lesser notebook. And lemme tell ya, this is not the same. The paper is scratchy. The cover is flimsy. The density is unconvincing. The way it feels beneath the pen and even the sound it makes when you handle the pages.... One of these things is not like the other. One of these things is not "luxury." If you are unfamiliar with the Moleskine notebook, if you missed one of my long ago rants about the joy of longhand lex on pulp-derived paper product, well… Let’s just say you’ve seen this notebook. There’s always somebody somewhere, in a Starbucks or at the conference table, who possesses this marketing marvel. And yes, the Moleskine is indeed a marketing marvel. It’s an expensive notebook that is sold on the backs of the Lost Generation. Some of the marketing hints that these are the same notebooks used in 1920s Paris cafés by struggling American writers with names like Fitzgerald and Hemingway as they scribbled notes for the nascent gems that would become their greatest works before finally dying of alcohol-induced arterial sclerosis or a self-induced gunshot. (Romanticizing the Lost Generation is a dangerous thing. They led mythologized lives that never worked out well on the other side of the myth.) In reality, the fabled Moleskine is a “luxury notebook” that has little to do with the Lost Generation. The company was founded in 1997 in Italy by Francesco Franceschi, and there’s been some consumer debate about “deception,” with this luxury Italian product being produced in China. I have not substantiated the China part. Whatever. Despite the lies, the words bad, and any other drivel that might ensue, the notebook is an honest product. And I still lament the loss just a little when I come to the end of a Moleskine. At the end of this last one, I was writing on behalf of a client. She’s a nice woman in New Hampshire, a doctor of audiology much beloved by her patients and staff. The last lines on the last page of the notebook are: The art of listening. The way you hear it. Changing perceptions. I didn’t even write those things. Honey did. I transcribed as she spoke them. (I do think “the art of listening” has a certain genius to it. It probably won’t make it into the marketing, but it deserves to be somewhere.) But that’s it. The end of the notebook. This morning, in the grayish dark of the pre-dawn Mountain West, I sat down to write about words. And I realized I feel bad because I can’t do so on that foolscap friend that kept me going lo these many months. A tiny grief, perhaps, as I scribble away in this new, lesser livre, bad metaphors and lousy alliterations and all. I miss my old notebook. But I love that my wife gave it to me. And more important, I love my wife and she still puts up with me, so there’s that and everything is relative. Words good. Notebook dead. Life endures. Win a notebook! Yes, you can have your very own copy of a brand new, not-a-Moleskine notebook. Just reply to this email and answer the question: Were these words good, bad, or middling, and why? Just one sentence. The respondent with the best answer wins a brand spanking new notebook for the pleasure of writing like the Lost Generation in Paris cafés minus the Moleskine, the café and the challenges of Paris. The best runners up will be published in a forthcoming Words Good, so be creative and pull no punches! Make me laugh! (Better yet, make Honey laugh.) Enter before midnight on Friday, October 1, 2021. 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 bargain price of $19.95 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!) IT'S DARK. IT'S RAINING.
We’re about to drive 700 miles from coastal Mississippi to central Texas. We are 100 yards into the journey--and have stopped dead. Clanging bells. Flashing red lights. The gates at the rail crossing have descended. The windshield wipers are swiping away. Ker-thunk. Ker-thunk. Ker-thunk. Did I mention that the middle of our route features a tropical depression? We sit there in the dark, watching an immense freight train crawl past. Amid the rumble and the rattle, I’m looking at the markings on the cars. I’ve certainly seen freights before. But I’ve never thought much about the markings on the car. Here now, at railbed level in the dark, I’m looking my headlights shining on the sides of the cars. Each passing car has a four-letter code stenciled in the lower left-hand corner. It’s clearly an identifier of some kind. SHPX RTDX SCYX TLDX There’s so much similarity in the string of cars, and the stenciled codes all have identical "art direction." But there’s one code that stands out from all the others. Ready? UTLX You can see the difference, can’t you? Ha! There is little difference in the four-letter code itself. But right underneath it in simple, block type, it says: “THE TANKCAR PEOPLE.” More faceless codes stream by, followed by another string of “UTLX/THE TANKCAR PEOPLE.” More cars and more codes. Then, several more “UTLX/THE TANKCAR PEOPLE.” I’m fascinated by the detail. Hundred of cars, hundreds of thousands of tons of metal, hundreds of iterations of codes… But only one code that has people involved. And clearly people are involved. This required thought and effort. And now, I’m involved. What are these codes? And who are the tankcar people? Get ready for your rail history lesson of the day. The code is called a “reporting mark.” It identifies the owner or lessee of a piece of “rolling stock” used on a rail network. The code reflects the name of the owner. And all this makes me think of a phrase often used by a late, great radio guru. When talking about why railroads failed when facing competition from airlines, he liked to say: “They thought they were in the railroad business. The didn’t realize they were in the people business.” Of course, he was talking about transporting people and not freight, but you get the gist. So, who is the owner of UTLX? Who are the tankcar people, who clearly know that despite transporting fluids, they’re serving people? Meet the company born in Chicago in 1866 as Union Tank Car Company. The company was established as a challenge to one of the nation’s greatest controversial business figures, John D. Rockefeller. It was also quickly acquired by John D. Rockefeller. In the late 20th Century, the company was acquired by the Marmon Group. In the early 21st century, Marmon Group was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway. (Are we surprised?) Today, UTLX is the largest manufacturer, lessor and maintainer of railcars in North America. It must be true. It’s on their website, which is quite good. It's far more engaging than one might expect from a website about a rail car business. But what’s most interesting about the great and ugly, ironclad products and sprawling corporateness of the ownership of this century and a half old company? It’s about the people. It’s an innocuous little three-word tagline. It has very little “creativity” involved, but is involving on a level that matters. Because down on the ground amid a vast and sprawling sea of anonymity, UTLX pops through and makes a simple statement. In railyards across North America, there are working people who are being reminded that UTLX are the tankcar people. Thousands of UTLX employees, and hundreds of thousands of railroad workers know who the tankcar people are. Even a guy sitting at a railroad crossing in the dark and the rain has some idea about UTLX. UTLX is the code, and the code is about people. Words good. People important. 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 bargain price of $19.95 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!) CREATIVE THINKING THAT INSPIRES, SURPRISES, DELIGHTS, AND DELIVERS A DESIRED RESULT.
At its best, that is what good writing is. Opinion? Perhaps. But it’s one of the reasons why advertising copywriting is so much fun. You get to weaponize words on behalf of your client, often blowing up the client’s bottom line in ways that are not possible using other means. But it’s not just about getting the words on paper. It’s about everything leading up to that. And sometimes, there are no words on paper at all. That’s why the peaceful screed colors outside the lines. It’s not just about writing the words. It’s about taking actions that inspire, and being inspired to take action that fuels words. It’s a productive cycle of energetic genesis. Good writing is good thinking. Good thinking makes things happen. Which is why we’re about to talk about a dive bar. (Yes, it’s a left turn. Go with it.) The Fabulous Honey Parker and I have many hobbies. One of them is dive bars. Dive bars are fun, in part because they’re often a place full of surprises and unusual people. Yes, sometimes there might be that loud, drunk woman with a voice like the angry laughter of an enraged crow perched on barbed wire, screeching and cawing about the ball game on the TV. You might also meet the retired schoolteacher who’s a millionaire real estate entrepreneur with a portfolio of local residential rental properties (and a much nicer laugh than the crow lady). You might meet a local criminal attorney who’s still wearing his suit from court that afternoon. Or the software engineer, sitting with his phone out, reviewing updates to a program under development. These people are there, and none of them know your name. Yet. Right now, they’re on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in a little dive bar with a fishing theme. Fishing happens around here. Dive bars, though? Not as often as they used to. It’s an artsy little town that has undergone a degree of gentrification. As one old-timer local told me, he’s just about the last of his friends who lives here. The place has become too fancy. Nonetheless, some of the dive bars persevere. They are dimly lit places with dark wood furnishings, out-of-state license plates on the walls, dollar bills tacked to the ceiling, and various surprises hidden throughout the (ahem) decorating. This Mississippi dive bar is different. Yes, it’s filled with local characters. But it’s also nationally recognized. It is lauded as one of the nation’s best dive bars. And it happens to be a pandemic survival story. Hello, pivot! One of the big selling features of this bar is they have an excellent low-country boil. If you’re not familiar with low-country boil, it’s some form of seafood (usually crawfish, shrimp or crab, or a combination thereof). The seafood is boiled in abundant spices along with sausage, corn and potatoes. That’s the traditional lineup. My personal boil recipe includes a rotating cast of green veggies to help dispel one’s overriding sensation of guilt that comes from scarfing down potatoes and corn alongside crusty bread, all with no greens. A boil is often dumped out onto a communal table and consumed with one’s hands. Beer is often in evidence. A good low-country boil makes people’s heads explode. And during pandemic lockdown, there was no boil happening inside this bar because nobody was allowed inside this bar. So the owner decided to give people something he felt they needed: a way to get boil takeout. Despite no formal drive-thru architecture (it’s a dumpy old stucco building covered in banners and beer signs), this man turned his bar into a drive-thru boil emporium. The inside of the bar was filled with boil pots, takeout containers and crawfish. A new banner outside proclaimed “Crawfish boil drive thru!” And people drove through, driving away with boiled low-country comestibles. This man’s revenue also went through the roof. And no, he’s not a writer. He owns a bar. He did write a simple sign advertising his product. He also wrote some simple, fun Facebook posts showing his promise of masked-up drive-thru boil. They featured a giant photo of a crawfish waving his claws, saying “You want some of this?!” And it was good. And profitable. Good writing is good thinking. Good thinking makes things happen. It’s thinking beyond the page. Good writers are often cogitating on the world, and how to put thoughts into action. Sometimes, that action is a pen across the page. Sometimes, it’s realizing how to best serve the customer. And sometimes, it’s just going into a strange new dive bar somewhere and seeing how other people reinvent their world, one dimly-lit, laughter-filled encounter at a time. 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 bargain price of $19.95 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!) ONE OF THE SIMPLEST TIPS FOR BETTER WRITING INVOLVES…NOT WRITING
Do you want to be a better writer? This is the simplest possible tip you will ever get on how to achieve that. It’s so simple, it might make you angry. You might even lash out at this piece of writing and hurl it across the room against the wall. Since you are probably reading this on a high-priced digital device of some kind, such a reaction is not in the best interests of said device. If you want to be a better writer, do this: Become a better reader. It doesn’t matter what kind of writing you want to do. Reading with an analytical eye helps you make your own writing better. This is especially useful (and dare I say easy?) when it comes to dialogue. Some writers required to create radio read this screed. I know they feel themselves challenged by the task of putting words into the mouths of their characters. “But isn’t listening to well-written dialogue important?” Yes. But so is seeing it on the page. (We’re talking about the script page. If you're writing scripts, reading literary dialogue is something else altogether.) Reading anything with an analytical eye helps reveal things like the structure, pacing and word choices that make writing come alive like Frankenstein’s monster on a thunderstorm night charged with verbal lightning. That was a stupid sentence. And reading it, you can get a quick lesson in how not to behave on the written page. Does your job require writing to persuade? If so, reading the writing that persuades you is a good first step. It’s how you hone the blade of that pen that is ostensibly mightier than the sword. And something else happens when you read good writing: where before there may have been only a fear of the blank page, you find something new and thrilling. You’ll feel the thrill of motivation. Read. Write. Be free. 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 bargain price of $19.95 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!) |
AuthorBlaine 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
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