Alex Steer

466 words | ~2 min

Have you heard of the Marmarati? They are, notionally, the secret society of fanatical Marmite lovers, the chosen few who get to express and celebrate their obsessive love for the yeast-based spread on a variety of social media platforms.

The Marmarati are the product of (or, you might say, they simply are) a social media campaign by We are social. It's a neat bit of brand-as-movement campaign-building, a sort of next step from initiatives like the Cadbury's For The Love Of Wispa campaign. And, as befits any decent secret society, especially in the post-Dan Brown era, they have a Latin motto.

The motto is Tantum Pro Diligo. It's not translated anywhere on the site, as far as I can tell, so presumably it's intended as a neat extra flourish for those Marmarati (or would-be Marmarati) who did a bit of Latin at school. It's meant to convey the idea that the Marmarati's actions are done 'all for the love' of Marmite.

Except for one thing. They've got their Latin wrong.

Any better classicists than me are welcome to wade in here (leave a comment, tweet or email), but to me it looks like they've looked up 'all', 'for', and 'love' in a Latin dictionary. 'Tantum pro' is fine, as far as I can see. But...

'Diligo' is a verb. This can happen with English-Latin dictionaries, which often give English entries listed by base form (infinitive without to - e.g. live instead of to live) and Latin entries listed by the first person singular present active - e.g. vivo ('I live').

So if you look up 'love' in an English-Latin dictionary, you may get 'diligo' back as a result, because you've accidentally looked at the verb 'love', not the noun. 'Diligo' means 'I love'.

Which means 'tantum pro diligo' means 'all for I love'. Which doesn't make much sense. The corresponding noun for 'love' is dilectio. So the Marmarati's motto should be Tantum Pro Dilectione.

Why on earth does this crusty classical pedantry matter? Because they've made it matter by including it. Language games can be fun, mischievously exclusive, and tantalising. Latin, in particular, is good for setting a certain tone: arcane, inaccessible, secretive. But if you get it wrong, you look silly.

PS - If I've got this wrong, I'm prepared to look silly, and blame it all on Muphry's law.

1155 words | ~6 min

Every year, with a certain regularity, various newspapers, publishing houses, bloggers and other organs of social commentary like to announce their words of the year: lexical items which, for their editors, embody some truth about language, current affairs, popular culture, technology or similar from the year in question. The most widely publicised of these (and among the most thoughtfully chosen) are typically those by lexicographers and linguists, especially those by the New Oxford American Dictionary (which picked 'unfriend' as its word for 2009) and the American Dialect Society (which picked 'tweet'). These picks are always fun, even where they are less insightful than the NOAD and ADS selections. As well as telling us a little about trends in pop culture, their endurance reflects both an interest in the formation and propagation of new (or newish) words and a continued belief that there is an intimate, or at least interesting, connection between language change and culture change.

Bates141, an Asia-Pacific-based consumer insight firm, has taken this approach and built on it. A year or so ago it published its first Dictionary of Change (large PDF), a guide to dozens of new words and phrases (mainly in English, with some from other Asian languages) that in their opinion throw interesting light on current consumer and social trends from 2008.

I tend to hold that good insights have some requirements in common with good dictionaries. They should be interesting, accurate and useful. How does the Dictionary of Change stand up as a dictionary and a piece of insight?

It is definitely interesting. For a start, it is very entertaining reading, especially if you enjoy portmanteau words. (There are loads of these in here, words of the 'ecosexual' and 'eatertainment' varieties.) It is also full of sharp, interesting insights into consumer attitudes and behaviour collected throughout the Asia Pacific region. As an accessible overview of consumer trends it therefore also passes the test of being useful and accurate, especially if you don't know much about those markets.

Of course, though, it's not just a piece of consumer insight analysis: it's a piece of consumer insight analysis dressed up as a dictionary. Here's where it starts to fall down for me, in terms of its accuracy and its usefulness. The big question is: why was a dictionary form chosen for this? There are two possible answers: either because (as mentioned above) people like lists of new words; or because the authors really believe that there is something extra useful to be gained from studying the ways in which consumers are reflecting social trends and attitudes in their use of language. In other words, is the dictionary form just meant to be interesting, or is it meant to be accurate and useful as well?

Dictionaries, like good insight reports, must reflect what's going on in the world if they want to be interesting and useful. A dictionary of shipping terms must faithfully record the terms used by people who sail ships and who work in the world of shipping that refer to ships, shipping and other ship-related things. A dictionary of law must do the same for legal speak; a dictionary of north-west English or of medieval English has the same sort of challenges. For a general dictionary (one that doesn't restrict itself to any subset of a language) the challenge is to record as many words as possible that have a fairly general currency and usage: in other words, a good coverage of words that English speakers can expect to use or encounter.

The Dictionary of Change (as its title makes clear) sets itself up as a new-words dictionary, and these are always tricky projects to manage. The words they contain are necessarily new, and so less familiar. Still, though, a good new-words dictionary will typically include words that have developed a fairly good currency and breadth of usage (so 'fairly new' words rather than 'very new' ones), and their editors tend to have to make a judgement about their chances of survival.

Here's the big problem with the Dictionary of Change as a dictionary. I can't speak for its non-English entries, but it is substantially in English, and the English entries do not, for me, pass these tests of currency and breadth. 15 of the English entries have notes to say that they have been 'coined by Bates141', and as such they do not really record anything but the kind of useful internal shorthand that insights people use a lot. Many of the others have a similar marketing-and-journalism ring to them. Lexicographers are always wary of 'journalism speak': words or collocations that are coined by journalists and only ever used by other journalists. (See my article on -gate words for a particularly productive set.)

This is a fluffy and amusing list of new hybrid words, most of which I doubt have any real currency beyond planners and journalists. This is fine for the interest value it provides, but it does not for me fulfil the criteria of being accurate or useful as a dictionary. It is accurate and useful in the coverage of consumer phenomena it offers, but little is added by the admission that marketing people have a word for each phenomenon. It doesn't tell us much about the interplay between consumer trends and language change, and for that reason it's hard to see why they packaged it as a dictionary except for novelty value.

It’s a shame, because 2008 would have been the perfect year for planners to write a guide to the words that really experienced sharp spikes in currency. Consider some of the following words and phrases, which most of us didn't know or use much before 2008:

• credit crunch
• sub-prime
• toxic assets
• credit default swap
• collateralised debt obligation
• double-dip
• negative equity
• ninja ('no income, no job or assets')
• tranche
• bailout (in non-aviation senses)
• deleveraging
• quantitative easing
• fiscal stimulus
• financial exclusion

 

Almost none of these are new words. Most were specific to bankers and economists before 2008. Now they have entered fairly common usage as part of the process of response to economic catastrophe that has exposed previously obscure financial practices and problems to public scrutiny. That, for me, is the real story of popular language change from 2008.

833 words | ~4 min

Apple has launched the iPad and got everybody talking. There have been questions about the concept and gags about the name.

Being the smart kind of company it is, Apple probably monitors its media spend and return on media investment quite carefully. I'd expect it, as with any big brand in the industry, to keep a close eye on its share of voice, to monitor buzz and even to monitor sentiment. Brands, after all, need to be good at listening to their consumers.

But there's one way of listening to consumers that Apple may have missed. And that's actually listening to them. In the literal sense. Listening to how they speak.

Specifically, to their vowels.

Almost as soon as the product name was launched, there was concern that the name was too similar to the existing 'iPod' - and, in particular, that there was a risk of phonetic confusion among some speakers. Googling 'ipod ipad confusion' gives a sense of some of this. Just running through the first few pages of Google searches provides a handlist of some of the speaker communities that the blogosphere thought might confuse 'iPod' and 'iPad':

• Bostonians
• Hispanic Americans
• 'Asians' (sic)
• US Mid-westerners
• Minnesotans

And so on. The argument that in Bostonian or North-East American English there is no distinction between the central vowel in 'iPod' and 'iPad' is particularly widespread. In fact, as far as I know, it's not correct, as this page on Bostonian phonology makes clear.

In fact, if I had to make a case for phonological groups that might confuse the two words, I might pick some varieties of Caribbean English which have unreduced short vowels realised towards the back of the mouth, as explained by the relevant section of E. W. Schneider et. al. (2004) A Handbook of Varieties of English Volume 1: Phonology:

The low front vowel /æ/ found in many metropolitan varieties of English in words such as TRAP is often realized further back in the mouth as [a]... Eastern Caribbean English-derived varieties often maintain the difference between sounds in words in metropolitan dialects like the /ɔ:/ in jaw and the /a:/ in jar... Both sounds have typically merged into /a:/ in the Western group.

Which implies that for some (though not all) Caribbean English speakers there may be little to no distinction between the POD and PAD sounds. (This also seems to be true for some speakers of Southern English Caribbean English Creole, usually known as London West Indian English, as this paper points out.)

That's about all I can offer, as I'm not a phonologist - nor, importantly, are many of the people who first raised the issue of iPod/iPad confusion. Many of them seem to be expressing concern on behalf of users of other varieties of English than their own - the worry that someone else might confuse the names. Which seems very kind.

A lot of people care a lot about Apple's products. They pore over their tech specs, their designs, and their names. If so many consumers care enough about the pronunciation of 'iPad' to start blogging about potential problems, that should send a pretty clear signal to brands - not just Apple - to pay a lot more attention to the language they use, and especially to names.

This is not just about being clever. Brand naming processes can be lengthy, creative and confusing, often generating ingenious, polysemous and heavily rationalised outputs that embody brands' core values, differentiate them within their categories, and contain fifteen different types of pun. Sometimes the results are camels, sometimes they're racehorses. Eventually, the name has to be put out there in the world, to be heard and seen and used by people who haven't been through that whole process with you and who may spot problems that the people from head office didn't even notice were there. Maybe it's a swearword in Japan, maybe it's unpronounceable in Jamaica. A little linguistic foresight - some science to go with the art - can save you a lot of headaches.

1376 words | ~7 min

Note: This post was updated in September 2016 as the hosting site (posterous.com) where the 'long give' document was hosted as a PDF no longer exists. Thanks to the Internet Archive for providing a backup.

This is off-topic (normal service resumes shortly), but I think it's important. @sarahewalker and I have been thinking about the situation in Haiti, and in particular about how principles of effective giving apply to disaster relief situations. When problems arise suddenly it's easy to let the understandable will to help immediately get in the way of a more even-handed and possibly more effective approach to aid.

So we've come up with The Long Give - a short list of principles which people might find useful when they want to make effective giving decisions that stand a chance of having long-term impact. It's designed to be quick, not perfect, but we hope it helps.

If it's interesting or helpful, please do share it. Thanks.

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This isn’t a fundraising drive. It’s an attempt to help us all get the most long-term benefit out of giving to disaster relief.

In the days since Haiti was devastated by a major earthquake, there’s been a huge outpouring of desire to help from all over the world. Simply, a lot of us want to do what we can to fix the situation as quickly and completely as possible.

Despite the tough conditions on the ground, where a lot of infrastructure has collapsed and many local charities and community organisations have been wiped out, the response by governments, the military, international aid agencies, companies and charities has been impressive. If you want to follow everything that’s going on, take a look at the Disaster Relief page set up by Facebook, which is tracking all the relief efforts. Facebook deserves a huge thank-you from the world for doing this.

So what about the rest of us? When a disaster hits, the first reaction is always to ask, ‘What can I do?’ We want to help immediately, and for most of us that means giving money. But then it gets confusing. How much should we give? Where should we give it? What will it do? And how can we help in the long term as well as immediately?

So with that in mind, we’ve written the Long Give List. It won’t tell you where to give your money, but it will give you some ideas if you want to think about how to make sure your giving has as much impact as possible.

Here goes.

1. Know why you’re giving. Before you give, ask yourself why you’re giving. What do you want to achieve? Short-term impact or long-term development? Rebuilding houses or supplying medical aid? Having a focus will help you decide how best to give.
2. Give what you can. Work out how much you can afford to give. (Be honest, now.)
3. Give according to your amount. If you’re giving a little, give it to a large fund where lots of individual donations will come together to do a lot of good. If you’re able to give a lot (we’re talking the tens of thousands of dollars here), don’t just throw it in the pot – talk to some of the charities or funds you’re thinking of backing, and ask how they could make the most of it.
4. Take your time. A lot of the first wave of relief in Haiti is already happening, funded by governments, international agencies and major charities. Your money will make a real difference in the longer term. So don’t feel like you have to make your donation today. Do a little homework, make it tomorrow, and make it better.
5. Treat every donation like an investment. You wouldn’t buy shares in a company you knew nothing about. That’s because when you buy shares, you want to benefit somewhere down the line. When you give to disaster relief, you want other people to benefit. So when you’re giving, know who you’re giving to and what they’ll do with your money.
6. Ask those awkward questions. Get on the website, get on the phone, send in an email – talk to the people you’re thinking of giving to.
7. What awkward questions? Well, you want to be sure the work you’re supporting is worthwhile, effective and sustainable. In other words, is there a point to it? Is it getting results? And will the organisation I’m supporting still be around in a year’s (or ten years’) time putting my money to good use? So ask charities to explain what they do, to give you some evidence that it’s changing people’s lives, and to demonstrate that they’re well run and have enough money to keep going. (If you’re stuck on this last bit, ask them to tell you their operating reserves in months – i.e. how long they could keep going for if all their sources of income suddenly dried up. Three to six months is normally a good sign.) If you want more help with this sort of thing, ask a professional non-profit analyst.
8. What about overheads, admin costs, etc? It’s tempting to ask how many cents in every dollar you give will go directly to the front line, and how many will be spent on running a charity’s offices, paying its staff, etc. But this isn’t always a good measure of effectiveness. What matters is what they get done, not how much they scrimp on office costs. As long as they’re not obviously frittering away cash, trust your charity based on their results, not their heating bill.
9. Give unrestricted. Again, it’s tempting, when you give your money to a charity, to say ‘I only want you to spend this putting roof tiles on schools in Port-Au-Prince’. That’s a good instinct, but if we all did it there’d be a massive stockpile of tiles but the charities wouldn’t be able to afford to keep running to put them on. Trust your charities enough to let them decide how to use your money. This is called giving to unrestricted funds, and is a very good idea.
10. Give to established organisations that know the territory. Sad to say, disasters attract a lot of newcomers. If you want to help Haiti, look for the organisations that were working there helping people before the earthquake hit. Oxfam America and the Clinton Foundation, for example, have a sustained presence in the country. Pick an organisation that knows what it’s doing.
11. Think long term. If you only have a certain amount of money to give, do you have to give it now? Consider waiting until the initial rush has died down. A lot of disaster relief efforts run into trouble because they receive huge amounts of money in one go, then have no income for a long time after that.
12. Think repetitive. Can you afford to give a little bit each month for the next year or two, rather than a whole lot now? Again, this will help smooth out the cash flow of disaster relief organisations.
13. Think different. (With apologies to Apple.) If you’re giving a large amount, in particular, why not think beyond the obvious? Once shelter and food and medical supplies have been provided, what will the longer-term needs be in Haiti? What about schoolbooks, architects, or even counselling? Can you give expertise as well as money? (That’s exactly what Facebook’s software developers have done, after all.)
14. Get help! If your country has a gift aid /tax reclamation scheme for charitable giving, make sure you know how to use it to get the government to donate the income tax on your donation amount. But think beyond that. Can you persuade your employer to match your donation? Can you get your friends to join in?
15. Share the love. If a charity you support is doing good work and getting results, don’t forget to say thank you. And use social media, conversations with friends, etc., to spread the good news and recruit more support.

That’s it!

348 words | ~2 min

This post is to announce @saxonchronicle, an automated Twitter account that is posting the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle one sentence at a time every hour.

Details first. The text is the public-domain version of the 1912 edition of Rev. James Ingram's 1823 Modern English rendering of the Chronicle, taken from the online text prepared by Douglas B Killings. Ingram's edition is a collation of readings from the nine different Chronicle manuscripts. His translation is not always great and some of his readings are very out of date, but the text was available, and it seemed a bit unnecessary to start tweeting in Old English (though maybe one day). If you're interested in the text of the Chronicle, see Tony Jebson's excellent online edition of the manuscripts.

I built @saxonchronicle partly as a proof-of-concept of an auto-tweeting script. The choice of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle happened, though, because I recognised something rather Twitter-like in the Chronicle as a text. It was begun, probably in Wessex in the 9th century, as a very snappy potted history of the world from a medieval English Christian point of view, and consists firstly of a whirlwind tour through the history of Britain from the birth of Christ to what was then the present day, and secondly of a series of short entries updating the Chronicle year on year. The latest-running version, maintained by the monks at Peterborough, was still being added to in 1154. Like most people's end-of-year letters, it contains a good mix of dramatic incident and humdrum personal notices. Much like Twitter, then.

The script I've written breaks the Chronicle down into sentences and posts them every hour. This may break sometimes if the post fails, and there may be a few sentences that are longer than 140 characters, though I hope not too many. It's all automated, and is a bit experimental, so treat it with patience. It's still easier to read than the original.

861 words | ~4 min

A year after it was published, I've just read Russell Davies's wonderful post on the lure of paper in a digitised (or digitising) age. In it he writes (of Dave Grey's Marks and Meaning):

Mr Gray was smart enough to realise two things; firstly that Lulu have made the mechanics of book-making so cheap and easy that you can move straight to the physical form of the thing as soon as you want. The best way to write a book is bundle all your notes and rough thoughts together and stick them in a book. Then carry that around, make amendments, even invite other people to do the same, until you fancy making another version. And one day, who knows there'll be a definitive 'finished' version. But maybe there never will be. The second is that, in many ways, that's a more interesting and involving thing to own than a finished book. You're getting an object, but you're also getting into a little community.

This stirred a half-forgotten recognition. Around the middle of the last decade, before I was a planner, before I was even specifically a linguist, I was a graduate student in the English Faculty at Cambridge, writing an MPhil thesis on the production and use of medieval books. Yes, really. Since it's a pretty tiny field, I'd guess there aren't many planners who have a training in historical bibliography (the analysis and description of old books and manuscripts) or book history (the study of book production and use in its historical contexts). That said, if you are a planner and you know your way round a short-title catalogue, or think of M. R. James as the author of the Oxford and Cambridge manuscript catalogues rather than of ghost stories, give me a shout.

I mention this because to a book historian Russell's insight about books and communities feels like a rediscovery as much as a revelation (though it's also that). Modern readers tend to think of medieval manuscripts as beautiful and pristine objects kept behind glass. That's because most of the ones we see are beautiful, pristine and kept behind glass. To a modern book historian, though, what's striking about the majority of manuscript books (not the museum pieces) is how scrappy they are. Manuscripts are like the best inventions, as Russell illustrates in the first part of his post:

• blurry;
• interesting;
• useful;
• always in beta.

They are perpetually unfinished, always under revision, often covered in corrections, bound and rebound and often with pages missing from rough treatment. Before the fifteenth century there were no printing presses, let alone print-on-demand services, and even plain books were correspondingly expensive and time-consuming to produce. They were passed around and passed down. As they moved from owner to owner they would accrue extra pages, sets of leaves (known as quires) which could easily be sewn onto the end of the existing book and covered with more reading matter. In other words, they were blurry, and always in beta.

The compendious manuscript on which I ended up writing my MPhil thesis (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108) started out its life, probably in the late 13th century, as a collection of saints lives written by a single scribe, with a couple of extra poems (both on hell, troublingly) tacked onto the end to fill a leftover sheet. Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, though, more pages and more texts were added to it by subsequent readers who decided to make themselves writers: a couple of romances, some more saints' lives, some lines of verse. On at least one occasion the manuscript fell apart and was rebound, not entirely in the right order. All of these additions and repairs - the things that made the manuscript blurry - were done because it remained interesting and useful.

Just as importantly, and just as relevantly to the trend Russell identifies, the book was thought worth adding to: not a museum piece, but a collaboration. In other words, creative collaboration and the always-beta project are not new developments, just rediscoveries. The medieval period in England and Western Europe was the high point of intellectual recycling. As modern readers we are blind to most of the literature of the period because we tend to ignore rehashes, rewrites, translations, commentaries, glossaries and annotations, but to their authors re-working was not a cop-out but an important social function: taking what was good, and making it better, rather than becoming too hung up on magnum opuses (okay, magna opera) and finished products.

If some of that community spirit is finding itself again in collaborative projects which happen to use new media rather than very, very old ones, that's no bad thing.

412 words | ~2 min

This post on the PR Watch discusses the accusation that Barack Obama avoided using the words 'terrorism' and 'terrorist' in his recent weekly address. The idea was apparently discussed in a debate on Chris Matthews's Hardball (a US political talk show on MSNBC) on January 2nd. The notion that the word 'terrorism' is taboo for the Obama administration has also been floated elsewhere by conservative political commentators.

The author of the PR Watch post, Lisa Graves, shows rather admirably that 'terrorist' or a variant is used 'at least six times' in the official transcript of the speech. The Politifact article linked to above also provides some clarity on the use of 'war on terror(ism)'. The strong version of the claim - that Obama won't use the word terrorism - is highly refutable.

As a very simple contribution to setting some of the facts straight, I've trawled the 2002-9 corpus of Obama's speeches available here. The results are:

Term	Occurrences	Speeches
Terrorism	79	39
Terrorist	58	24
Terrorists	98	45

Though it may be that this administration is striving to use the term less than the preceding Bush administration (where it was overused), these numbers does not suggest avoidance. It would be good to compare instances of it in George W Bush's speeches, though that would require a more comprehensive corpus of text for both presidents. Meanwhile, this piece by Jeremy Faro of Landor offers some reasons for thinking that there may be an effort underway by the Obama administration to redefine America's public vocabulary. If there is, though, it's not a simple case of replacing unpalatable old words with glossy Newspeak, but of reframing entire political conversations, a much more interesting and challenging task, and one that requires more careful scrutiny.

1022 words | ~5 min

The University of California at San Diego's 2009 How Much Information? report estimates Americans' total leisure-time consumption of information (measured in hours, words and bytes - see the report's methodology), based on existing household panel, census and survey data. One of the headlines making the news (see here, for example) is the estimate that since 1960 reading as a way of receiving information has grown in proportion and absolute volume. As the report puts it:

Conventional print media has fallen from 26 percent of [words received] in 1960 to 9 percent in 2008. However, this has been more than counterbalanced by the rise of the Internet and local computer programs, which now provide 27 percent of [words received]. Conventional print provides an additional 9 percent. In other words, reading as a percentage of our information consumption has increased in the last 50 years, if we use words themselves as the unit of measurement.

While this measure is not perfect, it reflects what is fairly obvious: that since personal computing is dominated by print media (especially the internet), and we spend more time using computers, we are reading more. The decline in reading traditional print media has not matched the growth in reading screens.

On the face of it, this suggests that the adage that interactive media are killing reading is no longer true. But the headline numbers of the kind in this study are, if anything, the least interesting and the least revealing part of the story. The 'death of reading' story is a reflection of some more deep-running concerns which we are choosing to play out through our relationship with words.

There is a partly-hidden agenda to the 'death of reading' story, just as when we say that television is killing the art of conversation (to which I say a resounding 'meh') or when the Buggles sang that video killed the radio star. This is the domain of sensitive sociolinguistic analysis, not of simple counting, and this is where the limitations of the UCSD study become apparent. When you hear people talk about the death of reading they are not talking about a decline in the number of printed words being taken in. Nor are they necessarily expressing concern at declining literacy, though the argument is sometimes expressed rather weakly in this way. It is demonstrably not true. In the UK, for example, literacy is at 99% (though around 16% of adults have literacy difficulties). An NFER longitudinal analysis completed in 1996 found that overall literacy levels had changed little since 1948. Attainment rates in Key Stage 2 English SATS has risen sharply since 1995, despite a slight and over-reported decline last year.

When people talk about a decline of reading, I suggest they are talking about a decline in a particular social model of reading. This is the model of solitary contemplation of printed matter for leisure, entertainment or instruction: the image of the man or woman in a room of one's own, from Ambrose of Milan (the first recorded silent reader) to the entire cast of Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. There is a sense that we give less time to a kind of quiet contemplative idea of reading that was formulated by the early Christian fathers, celebrated for its individualism as a facet of Romanticism and then feared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by those who worried about the disordering effect of working-class autodidacticism. We still love the idea of the idle reader, away from the world. Inevitably, sweeping changes will always be a threat to that quiet idea (as in the late eighteenth century, so now), and the technological changes that are affecting how we read are also, perhaps, making it harder to preserve the notion of reading as a discrete and disengaged activity. We are constantly confronted with the necessity of reading for information rather than for pleasure. Reading from a screen, even in our leisure time, feels less like play and more like work. Even if we are reading more, we feel like we are reading less.

Yet reading for pleasure, if printed book sales alone are any judge, is not noticeably in decline either. I think we are just increasingly aware of the relegation of printed matter to the margins of our reading experiences. I speculate that the new technology of screens are print media is unsettling to the stable social model of reading, and there remains something comfortable about printed books as physical objects - something whose sensory impression makes us feel that we are reading when we are reading from a page. This is, in other words, a period of technological disruption, when a new medium is thoroughly embedded in our lives but has not yet settled into a comfortable spot.

If there is anything correct in this analysis, what are the implications for people who need to push print at readers? Better and more focused, more thoughtful research is needed, but a starting point might be to suggest that screen could be the medium for making people not feel like they are reading, and print the medium for making people feel like they are. This insight has already (possibly) been identified by marketers trying to choose between direct mail and email, but a better understanding of our responses towards reading experiences might help those decisions be made in ways that are more effective for communicators and more valuable to readers.

495 words | ~2 min

Two of today's lighter news stories in the Telegraph turn on matters of language; both are slightly questionable.

The first is the bizarre, wonderful story of the man in Benxi, China who tried to convince a restaurant full of diners that he was a suicide bomber by going in with sausages strapped to his torso. A quote, attributed to one of the police officers attending the scene, is given:

It must have been terrifying for the customers but those things would only have gone off if you'd kept them past their sell by date.

Does this pun ('go off' = detonate/become putrid) even work in Mandarin? Has the gag (which is, admittedly, not bad) been inserted for the benefit of an English readership?

The other story is Facebook's list of the commonest terms in status updates this year. Helpfully, the list gives the topics (e.g. 'Facebook applications') and the specific terms used (e.g. 'Farmville, Social Living'). All are fine except the last:

15 - I
Specific words: I, is

This is far from clear in the Telegraph's coverage, but Facebook's blog entry on the status trends explains that the trend shows the increase in 'I' in status updates and the decline in 'is'.

Until March of 2009, people updated their status in a box that appeared next to their name on the home page and, consequently, many updates started with the word "is." Once that box no longer was shown next to people's name, the usage of "is" dropped off dramatically and usage of "I" doubled almost overnight. Prior to March of 2009, "is" represented about 9 percent of all words in status updates. With the change in interface, it remained high in absolute terms, but dropped all the way to about 1.5 percent recently while "I" increased from 1 percent to about 2.5 percent.

This is a pretty good measure. A more direct and plodding comparison would have been to look at the rise of 'am' against 'is', but this would have given a distorted picture, as it would exclude first-person statuses that don't use the verb to be, such as 'I love', 'I hate', 'I've just been', etc. Given Facebook's reputation, back in the days of the is-initial status, for producing syntactically mangled updates (e.g. 'John Smith is I hate Mondays'), it would be fun to know what proportion of posts begin 'is' and also contain 'I'.

Has anyone started building a corpus of social network status updates? Being able to run proper analyses on all that data would be fun. Maybe not that useful, but fun.

Happy Christmas.

1077 words | ~5 min

Let's start with the details before the analysis makes them pointless. On 20 December 2009 the winner in the annual competition for the UK Christmas Number One music single was announced. It was, rather unexpectedly, 'Killing In The Name' by Rage Against the Machine, a rap metal classic from 1992. The secret of the single's sudden festive success was a campaign on the social networking site Facebook. The 'Rage Against The Machine For Christmas No. 1' group, started by Jon and Tracy Morter, attracted over 960,000 members. Its aim was not just to get 'Killing In The Name' to the Christmas Number One spot. It was to prevent that spot from being taken, for the fifth year in a row, by the winner of the X Factor reality TV talent competition. This year's winner, `The Climb' by Joe McElderry, was relegated to Number Two. As far as anyone can tell, this chart result has been driven exclusively by the hype generated around this Facebook campaign.

I write this on the evening of the 20th December with a sense of mild but mounting dread, because I know what's coming. Fair play to the Morters, who have pulled off something quite spectacular. I just know that, as a planner, it is going to be my fate for the next several months never to hear the end of this. This is going to be the social media victory to end all social media victories. This is the archetypal story of ordinary consumers using the power of social networks to stick it to the man. Never mind that Rage Against The Machine's back catalogue is owned by Sony BMG, the same company that released Joe McElderry's single, and that this competition has been like a license to print money for them. Never mind that `Killing In The Name' is not only a violently anti-corporatist song but one of the least festive things you'll ever hear in your life. This is going to be the story of the power of crowds that will run and run and run.

It will appear, I confidently predict, in every PowerPoint presentation on social media for the next year. It will be impossible to sit in any meeting about digital marketing without hearing about it. Every trends deck, channel plan and comms strategy will feel duty-bound to namecheck it. It will become part of the frame of reference for comms strategists as surely as the Iranian election and the T-Mobile Flash Mob. (If you don't know what these are, look them up. There'll be a PowerPoint presentation waiting to enlighten you.)

Does it deserve this fame that it will inevitably garner? Maybe it does. It's quite an achievement, after all, despite the difficulties listed above. My problem is that it feels like such a hollow achievement. If good communications and brand planning should have as its aim to identify and meet people's wants, feelings, desires and hopes, then this seems a little small. It meets one desire - the desire to keep The X Factor off the Number One spot. But even in doing that it reminds us of the keen sense of loss we feel for the time when having a Christmas Number One was meaningful: when the last edition of Top of the Pops before Christmas was a national event; when the tail of singles releases was so short that you needed to sell a phenomenal number of records to be Number One; when music-buying, rightly or wrongly, felt like part of some collaborative effort, at Christmas time most of all. All of these drivers of behaviour are almost gone now. In the last ten years only two Christmas Number Ones have not arguably been propelled to the top by some sort of media (usually television) event. The charts have become a proxy, a sort of front organisation for other attempts to create common experiences through the media.

In its way, this Facebook victory is no different. This time the charts are acting not simply as a proxy for TV, as they have in recent years, but as a proxy for the battle between the perceived blandness of mass media and the perceived humanity and vitality of social media. In an interview, Zach De La Rocha, the Rage Against The Machine front man, described this as a battle between a 'sterile pop monopoly' and an 'incredible grassroots campaign'. I'm not so sure, myself, that this doesn't represent a rather sterile Facebook monopoly. Not on the part of the group's creators, but on the part of everyone who didn't want another X Factor Number One and who therefore got behind the Facebook campaign. Can almost a million people who joined the group, or the half million who downloaded the song, really have wanted `Killing In The Name' at Number One? Or did they just want something other than The X Factor? Where was the creativity of intention that said that we don't need a Christmas Number One any more? Why didn't half a million people organise into flash mobs across Britain and sing songs, or sweep the streets, or hand out soup and tea on some of the coldest nights the country has seen for a long time? That would have been harnessing the power of social networks far more than joining in a rather reductive either/or game through the charts.

So congratulations to everyone who took The X Factor off its perch - it is, on its own, one hell of an achievement. But to those of us who make a living talking about consumers and brands, let's pause a bit before we decide that this is is the best that hundreds of thousands of interconnected human beings can manage to do with their new medium.

(I realise this post has had very little linguistic content. The song is noteworthy for its rather sweary refrain, though, which is presumably the reason it was selected as the anti-X-Factor candidate. With that in mind, I can do no better than point you towards my former colleague Jesse Sheidlower, whose book and blog The F Word deal with the word in question in impressive detail. Let this be a starting point for anyone who feels tempted to wade in complaining about swearing in the Christmas Number One.)