One can't help but wonder whether Marc Benioff, CEO and co-founder of Salesforce.com, is planning to enter politics. In a new book, The Developer's Guide to the Force.com Platform published by Salesforce.com, you'll find the following:

One can't help but wonder whether Marc Benioff, CEO and co-founder of Salesforce.com, is planning to enter politics. In a new book, The Developer's Guide to the Force.com Platform published by Salesforce.com, you'll find the following:

Posted on December 23, 2008 at 08:30 PM in Books, Business, Language, TypoWatch, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Call this a petty complaint—on second thought, don't. It's not petty. It's alarming how rapidly major publications are deteriorating into typo-ridden, language slaughterhouses.
This photo caption from a story on the Oregonian's OregonLive.com site today reads:
Gotta good caption for this photo? Post it in the comments below.
Gotta? I can understand relaxing the language a little bit at times, but gotta? That's just plain tacky.
Posted on February 22, 2008 at 05:12 PM in Language, Media, Steve's Peeves, TypoWatch | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: gotta, grammar, language, news, newspaper, spelling, style, The Oregonian, typo
I did a double take when I saw this ABC News story subtitle in Google News just now.
Gunman Kills 5 at Public Meeting in St. Louis Suburb Before Police Take Him Out
The almost flippant slang phrase take him out is just plain wrong in the context of a story about six people being shot to death, two of whom were police officers. It's disrespectful at best. This isn't an episode of Cops or Reno 911. What is the news coming to?
Posted on February 07, 2008 at 09:03 PM in Current Affairs, Entertainment, Language, Media, News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: ABC News, disrespectful, innapropriate, language, slang
This is a screenshot from Google News just now. I posted yesterday about how none of the major news outlets seems to edit or proofread their stories for spelling and grammar anymore. Well, it appears they've ditched their fact checkers, too. Did the news writers go on strike along with their Hollywood brethren? I guess it is only a difference of a measly 17 billion dollars...
Posted on February 07, 2008 at 08:41 PM in Language, News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: accuracy, deficit, economic stimulus bill, facts, Google News, tax rebate
I considered starting a series on Ask-Steve.com in which I would feature glaring typos from prominent news outlets, websites, e-mail newsletters, etc. I can see now that, given the fact that it's becoming difficult to find a page without a typo, that series would quickly consume my entire blog. But I'll post one more anyway.
Posted on February 06, 2008 at 04:00 PM in Language, Media, News, Steve's Peeves | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: editing, error, mistake, news, proofreading, Reuters, typo
I don't think a day goes by now where I don't see a glaring typo in a book, magazine, major website, e-mail newsletter, etc. Many days I see more than one. It could be that it's because the sheer volume of stuff being printed everyday every day has skyrocketed. (Thanks for the guest proofread, Editor at Large!) Maybe it's just impossible for organizations to churn out this much content and actually send it through an editorial (or at least proofreading!) pass first. Whatever the excuse they might offer, it's inadequate. I love words and language and it sucks to see the attention paid to its proper use going down the toilet on such a massive scale.
[Note that Love is spelled properly (with an s) in the body of the e-mail, but not in the e-mail subject line—the most important part of an e-mail. Especially an e-mail trying to grab attention and sell something.]
Posted on February 06, 2008 at 02:13 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Language, Media, Steve's Peeves | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: copywriting, editing, error, grammar, New Seasons, spelling, typo
Like it or not, we live in an age of sound bites, film clips, stock photos and snippets of text. Blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter and similar services are all meant to give us low-commitment nibbles from an overwhelming smorgasbord of data.
In this blog-eat-blog world of ideas and idea-logs, the most powerful brand typically wins. I don't mean brand in the corporate jingle kind of way. Well, I guess I do. Because even if we switch from the world of money to the world of ideas and politics, we're still competing for the same seconds on the same clock and the same CPU cycles in the same wetware (brains).
So what I want to know is, how did the Right sell their Trojan horse PR package to the Left?
Let's start with the word Left. I started by listing common phrases employing the word:
And that's about it! But that last one is the kicker. The one that should send any brand expert running. The definition I gave for left handed above is only the first of six listed in WordWeb Pro. Here are the others:
So outside of the relatively innocuous fourth definition—indicating a counterclockwise rotation—there just isn't a great deal to recommend the word.
What's that? I can hear someone shouting from the back... Ah, yes. Let me repeat for the whole audience. "Damn straight, man! We ARE moving counterclockwise! We're moving counter to the dominant paradigm! Counter to the dominant power!" Yes, great points all. We are the scrappy underdogs. The feisty and determined dissenters shouting... from the back of the room. And then getting dragged out and tased into twitching, screaming spasms of YouTube fodder when we don't pipe down. All of which no doubt contributed to Irving Kristol's motivation to betray his associates and slide so far to the radical Right, founding what we now know and loathe as neoconservatism. But that's another story...
It's important to look here at where the term Left, in the political sense, originated—it's history and evolution. To do it justice, like many of the things I'm only mentioning in passing in this piece, would require a lengthy article. And that's what Wikipedia is for. But in short, the term came from France where it originally referred to the seating arrangements in the various legislative bodies of France, specifically in the French Legislative Assembly of 1791, when the king was still the formal head of state, and the moderate royalist Feuillants sat on the right side of the chamber, while the radical Montagnards sat on the left.[14] This traditional seating arrangement continues to be observed by the Senate and National Assembly of the French Fifth Republic. The Wikipedia entry on left-right politics is a rich and fascinating read.
These terms are widely used in the modern United States, but as on the global level, there is no firm consensus about their meaning. The only aspect which is generally agreed upon is that they are the defining opposites of the United States political spectrum. "Left" and "right" in the U.S. are associated with "liberal" and "conservative," respectively, although the meanings of the two sets of terms do not entirely coincide. Depending on the political affiliation of the individual using them, these terms can be spoken with varying implications. A 2005 poll of 2,209 American adults showed that "respondents generally viewed the paired concepts liberals and left-wingers and conservatives and right-wingers as possessing, respectively, generally similar political beliefs", but also showed that around ten percent fewer respondents understood the terms "left" and "right" than understood the terms "liberal" and "conservative".[20]
Let's look at how the word Left fares within a global cultural context. Maybe it's just gotten a bad rap in the U.S. I'd like to introduce my good friend, Wikipedia:
Okay, okay. We get the picture. But this is clearly just a Western phenomenon. Again, my all-knowing friend:
Even the word "ambidexterity" reflects the bias. Its intended meaning is, "skillful on both sides". However, since it keeps the Latin root "dexter", which means "right", it ends up conveying the idea of being "right-handed at both sides". This bias is also apparent in the lesser-known antonym "ambisinistrous", which means "clumsy on both sides" and derives from the Latin root "sinister."[20]
Okay, so we're pretty much screwed when we look at the definition and etymology of the word Left. How about its phonetic value? One of the ways that we associate words is by how they sound and what words they rhyme with. What do we come up with?
LEFT: bereft, cleft, deft, heft, theft, weft
And that's pretty much it. Not an illustrious bunch. The word left just doesn't sound very light or bright. Nor does it delight. Alright, I'll be forthright and say it's more than a slight blight on those of us who choose to alight left of right!
If we look at only the one- and two-syllable words that rhyme with right, we find at least 171 of them:
RIGHT: affright, airtight, alight, alright, aright, axite, backbite, backlight, bight, birthright, bite, blacklight, blight, bobwhite, bombsight, bright, bullfight, byte...
[Sigh...] So what about the semiotics of our dominant political iconography? On the right, the Republicans have the elephant. On the left (at least I think the Democrats haven't crossed the center line, yet - though they seem to be gunning for it), the Democrats have... the jackass.
The most common symbol for the party is the donkey, although the party itself never officially adopted this symbol.[38] The origins of this symbol are unknown, but several theories have been proposed. According to one theory, in its original form, the jackass was born in the intense mudslinging that occurred during the presidential race of 1828 in which Andrew Jackson was sometimes called a jackass by his opponents. A political cartoon depicting Jackson riding and directing a donkey (representing the Democratic Party) was published in 1837. A political cartoon by Thomas Nast in an 1870 edition of Harper's Weekly revived the donkey as a symbol for the Democratic Party. Cartoonists followed Nast and used the donkey to represent the Democrats, and the elephant to represent the Republicans.
How fitting. We took a term of derision and insult and appropriated it, making it ours. Owning it. Yes! Take that, political opponents of Andrew Jackson!
The mascot symbol [of the Republican Party], historically, is the elephant. A political cartoon by Thomas Nast, published in Harper's Weekly on November 7, 1874, is considered the first important use of the symbol.[55] In the early 20th century, the usual symbol of the Republican Party in Midwestern states such as Indiana and Ohio was the eagle, as opposed to the Democratic rooster. This symbol still appears on Indiana ballots.
Despite its current lack of respect due to commonly used pejoratives like dumbass and jackass, the donkey actually holds its own quite well in world religion, myth, fable and folklore. Unfortunately, those have mostly faded and we now have the following:
And what of the elephant?
With a mass just over 5 kg (11 lb), elephant brains are larger than those of any land animal, and although the largest whales have body masses twentyfold those of a typical elephant, whale brains are barely twice the mass of an elephant's. A wide variety of behaviour, including those associated with grief, art, play, use of tools,[32] compassion and self-awareness [33] evidence a highly intelligent species on par with cetaceans and primates.[34]
Alright, so they're smart. How are they viewed in the context of religion and philosophy?
And in politics and secular symbolism?
And in pop culture?
So a bit of a mixed bag there... But all in all, I have to say that I think the Right put us in their sights and, despite the Left feeling that we were too deft to succumb to their heft, when it comes to branding there's nothing to cite that will induce me to feel other than that the hapless ass is left in a terrible plight: airtight and bereft in the elephant's cleft.
All this being the case, isn't it perhaps time to consider a rebranding exercise? Must we remain so closely tied to and call ourselves by a term that is today clouded in ambiguity and has its origins in the 18th Century seating arrangement of the French legislature?
Posted on October 26, 2007 at 11:53 AM in Language, Media, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Have fun explaining this one to your kids while you're standing at one of the four busy bus stops on the corner of SE 39th and Hawthorne in Portland. ("Hooked on Phonics be damned!")
I'm a very outspoken advocate of free speech--but good taste has to weigh in somewhere...
[And yes, I'm aware of the irony of this post in light of my "public bathroom mischief" entry of yesterday...]
Posted on March 21, 2007 at 12:43 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Entertainment, General, Language, Music, Society | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
I picked up Wine Press Northwest magazine for the first time the other day at New Seasons Market. It's a great magazine covering, as the title describes, all things having to do with wine in the Pacific Northwest.
I've always been a spelling and grammar queen, but I rarely pay much attention to page layout. This page in the Winter 2006/2007 issue of Wine Press Northwest is definitely the exception.
At least two-thirds of the page is taken up by an advertisement with only a narrow column on the right, running into the center fold, occupied by copy. Guess what they chose to squeeze in there? The article title reads:
3 NW winemakers die
There wasn't enough room to at least spell out the number three; the correct way to spell a number that begins a sentence. Especially one announcing the passing of not one, but three human beings. Not only that, but the title also gives the impression that these three individuals died in a single indcident, but that isn't the case. They were just all lumped into one cramped, sliver of a blurb.
There is just so much wrong here. I realize that Wine Press Northwest is a small publication with no doubt a very small staff. To modify an oft-quoted parents' admonition: When talking about something as sensitive as people passing away, if you can't say something nicely, don't say it at all.
Technorati Tags: advertising, design, layout, magazine, Oregon, copywriting
Posted on March 20, 2007 at 05:44 PM in Books, Current Affairs, Food and Drink, Language, Media, News, Steve's Peeves | Permalink | TrackBack (1)
This one is just too funny to pass up. How could Rubbermaid have not seen this coming?
Or maybe it's one of those situations where the designer did see it coming.
Maybe the name was coined by a bored marketing person who knew it would make it safely through the internal hoops at Rubbermaid—and then give people some great laughs when clever bathroom visitors inevitably discovered the hidden gem and took artistic license with it.
Or perhaps it was devised this way from the start. Think online viral marketing carried to the most mundane level: a diaper changing table in a public restroom. It's certainly not something I thought I'd ever be blogging about, and yet here I am giving Rubbermaid some publicity and product promotion on Ask-Steve.com.
I do have to say that I wouldn't have written about this, though, if there weren't a very direct political tie in. That being the fact that the revised name of the Sturdy Station applies just as accurately to the current White House as it does to the diaper
changing station.
[This photo was taken at the McMenamin's Bagdad Pub restroom on SE 37th & Hawthorne in Portland, Oregon]
Technorati Tags: advertising, Bush, graffiti, neoconservatism, Oregon, politics, Portland, public art
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