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It’s almost complete, after 45 years, it’s almost there. A dozen surviving researchers are wrapping things up, puting the final touches on “Slab-Z, ” the fifth and final volume of a series first published in 1975 by Harvard University Press is scheduled to be completed next year.
DARE, “The Dictionary of American Regional English,” is finally closing in on completing what has to be the coolest thing I’ve heard about in the last few years: completely documenting America’s geographically variant vocabulary. All of it. The regional patois that communicates the great American quilt.
I’m not even going to start to go into examples, I couldn’t even begin to do it justice, you get the gist. What’s so great about it is the documentation of variant words and phrases not found in normal dictionaries that we all, no matter where we live, use with our neighbors without thinking. And if we we’re born somewhere else other than our current domicile, oh how we all easily slip into our common threads when we return ‘home’.
Tom Wolfe calls DARE his “favorite reading.” I gotta get this (that’s right, it’s only in hard copy), but I’m not even sure where to start…
Yes, we all know about Americans’ love affair with food, and the broadening of our palates the past twenty years. One of the reasons I decided on an early career in advertising was that, back then, it meant a move to NYC, which meant an increased food spectrum. Where else could I get Malaysian delivered to my door on a whim at 11pm on a Tuesday evening?
Alas, no longer. The dance of Asian and Latin cuisine has changed what we expect from food, and all kinds of food, especially ever-present junk food available at arms length in every corner C-store. Nowadays food combinations are not just the providence of chefs, but chemists in laboratories such as International Flavors and Fragrances, who provide new potions to leading snack food manufacturers. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article by Miriam Gottfried, in addition to adding tastes of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, food companies now seek to add “umani,” a Japanese word meaning “good flavor.”
Umani is not a flavor, but an experience to ‘amp’ food, bring up an intensity of flavor to satisfy the need for a spicier, fruitier, bigger flavor experience. The result? Potentially, the development of a generation of flavor junkies who become desensitized to the true flavors exhibited by ‘real’ food.
No longer is hot good enough, now we need three levels of heat intensity. Fruit flavors blend to create a polyglot that really isn’t a flavor, but rather a fusion of high and low notes. We don’t really seek food that is flavorful, but rather a series of taste sensations packaged in various forms of food delivery systems.
How many times have you or your pal said to each other, “It’s a great business idea, but I just don’t have the extra money to make it happen right now. I just can’t take the risk.” Now you can, using OPM (Other People’s Money), readily availably via the website Kickstarter.
A site that connects creatives–musicians, authors, designers–with donors willing to provide financial support. You get to pitch your idea on the site, offering some kind of payback for those who contribute to your idea, not necessarily money. Kickstarter gets five-percent of monies raised, and you get the rest. The key is that a deadline is set for you to raise the dough, so if others don’t see your idea as viable, it’s back to square one.
Since launching about a year ago, over 650 ideas have received funding. Not bad…
A recent article in the WSJ titled “Hard Questions From ‘Soft’ Sciences” got me thinking, and when I’m spurred to think a bit, I might as well share the thought!
In much of the last century, the goal of science was to answer “big” questions in the ‘hard’ sciences: curing polio, getting to the moon, building a better car, quicker. In school as a kid, I was taught the validity of objectivity by way of the “scientific method” – observable, empirical, and measurable evidence as a methodology to reasoning. In high school, both my statistics and biology teacher explained that this approach led to the development and advancement of knowledge as we know it, and the main reason why we don’t all still lived in caves. “Thank God they came up with that!” I remember thinking at the time, for I kinda liked the way I had my bedroom set-up at the time.
Not any longer. Nowadays, probably since the 70s, the public discource of inquiry has shifted to the study of the social sciences. Even more recently, say the past ten years, this focus on social scientific inquiry has taken a nose dive, and become notably obsessed with pop consumer behavior. People of all stripes, not just business leaders, are reading “The Tipping Point”, “The Blank Slate”, and “Freakanomics” to better understand, in a couple hundred pages, the application of sociology, psychology, evolution, and economics. Grasping the dynamics of the social order in less than a week; understanding the big ‘why’s’ of the order of man in his environment.
Heck, only twenty years ago the business and social sciences sections of a bookstore was the vestige of dull bankers seeking interest rate formulas or neurotic mothers trying to figure out why their kids smoke pot. Now bin titles are pushed up to the best sellers table, featured as top choices on Amazon, or visiting visiting a Kindle or iPad near you.
Arguably, the social sciences today are under attack from those seeking a book deal and $25,000+ fees from keynote speaking at marketing conferences. It’s a good gig if you’re willing to spend a chunk of time pouring over the past two decades of arcane academic journals in a particular field of social science study; find themes of scholarly discourse that evolve and bubble up over time in the literature, and then condense the themes into palaple chapter-bites of info dumbed down to a Flesch Readability Index at the junior-high school level (i.e. cocktail party banter). Then find an agent to sell it to a publisher; then get a stylist.
What ever happened to the a good old-fashioned maturation in a social sciences graduate degree program for those of us who sought beyond the strict adherence to the scientific method explaining all (and detour a few more years from fulltime work)? I mean, what’s wrong with being mentored by scholars who, without motive of profit or fame, help align the stars a bit?
In the end, I’ve never read Gladwell (yes, I’ve lied) or really any of the others who provide ‘cliff notes’ on social phenomena. Myself, I choose to go to the source, the academics, the originals. Like Gladwell? Read Granovetter and Rodgers. That’s what grad school taught me. If you skip to shortcuts, your only shorting yourself…
Even the ‘screw it all’ attitude of British punk rock had a business element to it, money was to be made. And no one was more aware of this, and arguably more important in developing, packaging, and selling punk to the world media than Malcolm McLaren. Malcolm died yesterday of cancer at age 64.
Malcolm was the original “cool hunter” for no one could sniff out a trend more effectvely. I can’t even begin to account for the ripple effect he’s had on today’s world of music, fashion, advertising, and general culture. Like the name of the company his son founded, Malcolm was an Agent Provocateur.
God rest his provocative soul, for the business world could sure use a few more Malcolms and a heck of a lot less of everyone else…
So much marketing research testing goes on in the CPG industry with food products. I just don’t get it. Sure, you can tweak a product a bit, and maybe it’s packaging, name and positioning a lot – but a product just works, or it dosen’t, and most don’t. I’ve heard a few times that something like 60,000 new products fail each year! Some products on the other hand just ‘work’, and have for years.
The other night I was watching college basketball, and was getting late after a light dinner. I shuffled to the fridge, opening the freezer out of habit, and there they were: a half box of “Thin Mint” Girl Scout cookies that I forgot about from a few weeks back. Yes! With a glass of milk (which is a rare occassion nowadays, but a prerequisite for such occassions) I plunked down and merrily proceeded with the Duke game.
My God, some, but so very few, man-made foods are as perfect as a Thin Mint. I don’t want to argue the frivolities about packaging or how cookie count has decreased over the years. They are, as is the marketing, sales, and channel distribution processes behind them (i.e. “cookie master?”), the perfect packaged food. They are, I will say, my favorite food on earth.
And no guerilla marketing/crowd sourcing/viral campaign can match the sheer veracity of three 10 year-old steely-eyed girl scouts, uniforms replent with merit badges, with a table of cookies in front of a Loews on a Saturday afternoon….
When I taught junior year statistics at UCONN, it was the core course that many loathed and all respected. In my opinion it was the only course in the communications department the kids had to stay completely on top of to get through the semester. Other courses you could skip a week at the beach, copy notes from a buddy or get the 5-minute download. But not COMS301, no way.
Being a stat class, I graded on a normalized curve. And usually a “C” was a raw grade average of about 51. What can I say… for most the ‘curve’ saved their butt - it might have hurt the one or two kids for whom stats was a natural slam dunk, but they too respected the overall shadow stats cast on their peers and accepted normalized grading with their raw scores of 95 or the like converted into z-scores. Yes, it was grade inflation, but I couldn’t turn trotters into race horses in one semester, so you gotta do what you gotta do to get people by in this world.
The beauty of normalized grading is that EVERY raw score falls into a range with PREDETERMINED parameters. There were few cases of kids trying to eke out a higher grade, but the score just ‘fell’ where it fell. And with stats, the problem sets are graded with scalpel precision, either you write down the correct methodological approach and subsequent output, or not (A nice diversion from teaching interpersonal comm and advertising. Maybe tough for them, but a breeze for me).
The instances when students would come to me sulking, pleading for a grade change was not when they received an F, for those kids knew pretty much all along they were ‘toast’, and faded into the woodwork at semester end. Instead, it was the “strugglers,” the poor SOBs who received the dreaded D+, or “below average, plus.”
I knew who they were when they entered my office. They had that look of inward soul searching, not knowing how to define themselves, perhaps dancing the razors-edge of their first true identity conflict.
They would totally freak out. They would first start by pleading for the cliff-hanging C-, which would earn them high-fives and a few free beers from their pals. Then, they would finally grovel, pleading for a straight D, which they perceived as a normal grade, even eking by with a D- by a few last gasps. But nobody in their right mind wanted to receive, or even worse, show their parents a D+.
I even had an instance where a gal took the class over to try to eradicate her dreaded D+. I don’t remember what grade she finally ended up with, but she was pale all summer long.
Ronald McDonald is a psychotic killer on the loose in what appears to be bright and sunny suburban LA, and has taken Big Boy hostage. A team of foul-mouthed Michelin men cops are in fast pursuit, and in the fray, Planter’s Mr. Peanut, an innocent patron at a restaurant, gets caught in the cross-fire and the top of his peanut head is blown off. Another day in Logoland…
One of the lesser but raucously funny animated short films I caught last weekend in the film compilation 2010 Academy Awards – Nominated Animated-Short Films. A tremendous collection of ten films from around the world, demonstrating in anywhere from six to thirty minutes each, deft creativity in an animated environment.
What is particularly unique to these films, compared to much of the more hyped du moment animation (i.e. Avatar) is the sly and terse writing accompanying the graphics, delivering complete, other-wordly witty statements within minutes. For without the copy, the art would likely remain pretty, but vacant, i.e. style with no substance (my rub with the boom in neo-manga nowadays). Proving once again, you gotta first be well-read, and read well, to write well.
