Un Words

Before you unfriend that geek you unearthed at the unconference on unmarketing last week, pause for a moment of gratitude.

You can thank two IBM researchers, Lance Miller and John Thomas, for our love of "un" words.

Musing over computer commands, they wrote in a 1976 report, “It would be quite useful to permit users to ‘take back’ at least the immediately preceding command (by issuing some special ‘undo’ command).”

But Shakespeare also favored "un" words.

The Bard is responsible for no fewer than 314 of the ones that appear in The Oxford English Dictionary, including unsex, unshout, unspeak and unswear.

Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre, has her character say, “I had learned to love Mr. Rochester; I could not unlove him now.”

And contemporary songsters like "un" words, too.

Among Bob Dylan lyrics, one of my favorites goes:

"You taught me how to love you, baby

You taught me, oh, so well.
Now, I can’t go back to what was, baby
I can’t unring the bell."

Seeing Differently

I've been taking a basic drawing class every Saturday for the past two years.

The art school's catalog promises the course will teach you to "see things like an artist."

After many repeat classes (I'm a slow learner) I can vouch that the catalog doesn't overpromise.

Learning to draw, in fact, rewires you to see differently.

You begin to focus on details and relationships that were once invisible to you.

In an essay, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin (himself an artist) contrasts the experiences of two people strolling in the woods. One is "a good sketcher;" the other with "no taste of the kind."

The latter sees only trees. "He will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect, but that the trees make the lane shady and cool," Ruskin writes.

But the sketcher sees more: dancing motes of sunlight; emerald-bright mosses and surreally shaped lichens; gnarled and ancient trees awash in light and shadow; and a canopy of leaves of "a hundred varied colors."

"The enjoyment of the sketcher from the contemplation of nature is a thing which to another is almost incomprehensible," Ruskin writes.

"If a person who had no taste for drawing were at once to be endowed with both the taste and power, he would feel, on looking out upon nature, almost like a blind man who had just received his sight."

Brevity. Before It was Cool.

A recent study by Microsoft reveals that 67% of heavy social media users struggle to concentrate.

Ultrathin attention spans make brevity—or, more accurately, conciseness—more important to marketers than ever.

In his introduction to the 1979 edition of The Elements of Style, E.B. White praised his teacher and coauthor William Strunk for writing, fifty years earlier, "fifty-nine words that could change the world." 

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

It's little wonder Strunk revered brevity. 

He was an English professor at Cornell; forced to read undergraduates' papers, he understood well there are limits to the patience of every reader—even an academic.

The Snaky Story of Hashtag

The word "hashtag" has roots in the US military. 

Sort of.

It all starts in 1907...

Enlisted men and women begin to nickname the service stripes worn on dress uniforms "hash marks."

Each stripe represents three years of duty—and untold plates of hash eaten.

Now, flash forward to 1962...

Scientists at Bell Labs add a key to the new "touch-tone" phone: the # key.

It lets callers send instructions to the phone's operating system.

They pirate a word used by mapmakers, and proudly dub the # key the "octothorpe."

An octothorpe is the mapmaker's symbol for "village" (eight fields surrounding a town square). 

"Octo," of course, means "eight;" "thorpe" means "field" in Old Norse.

But Americans already know the # key as the "pound key" from typewriters (where # means "number").

"Pound" sticks when touch-tone phones hit the market.

All along, our cousins in the UK—where "pound" refers to the symbol £—are calling # "hash."

As are computer programmers, many of whom are ex-military, and familiar with those hash marks on uniforms.

Now, flash forward to 2007...

A Silicon Valley marketer named Chris Messina sends a Tweet.

He urges everyone to use # to denote Twitter chats. 

Messina names # the “channel tag."

But Twitter's early adopters insist on calling # the "hashtag."

Finally, flash forward to 2013...

The American Dialect Society assembles in Boston to announce its prestigious "Word of the Year."

Can you guess the word?

Hint: It isn't "octothorpe."

Paper Cuts

Ad spending fell 4% in the first quarter versus last the year, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Outsized cuts came to print vehicles.

Newspapers suffered a 15% falloff, while magazine advertising was trimmed more than 8%.

The absence of special events like 2014′s Sochi Olympics worsened the decline. 

Nonetheless, cuts by the 10 biggest spenders—companies like Procter & Gamble, General Motors and AT&T—exceeded 10%.

Those advertisers trimmed spending "to cut costs and navigate the complexities of the digital ad market," the newspapers says.