During my undergraduate days, I learned from one of my communication professors that the Coca-Cola company ran into an unexpected complication during their initial incursions into Chinese markets when the very name of the product caused mass confusion. Apparently, the syllables “ko-ka-ko-la” are nonsensical in Mandarin, where they can be taken to mean, roughly, âbite…
Tag: language
Resist Dystopia: Learn to Enjoy Reading Shakespeare
At the conclusion of Technopoly, Neil Postman lays out his concept of the “loving resistance fighter,” someone who keeps an open heart and a strong hold on the symbols and narratives of liberty, honor, intelligence, etc., that made America (and, by extension, other modern democracies) great, while deliberately resisting the coarsening, dumbing, soul-killing influence of…
My fellow barbarians: The dumbing of Americans and their campaign speeches
Two days ago, the August 31 edition of the PBS program Need to Know concluded with a brief video retrospective of American political convention speeches from the last century: From William Jennings Bryan to FDR to Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama, anchor Jeff Greenfield takes a look at the convention speeches that propelled some politicians…
Alan Greenspan explains “Fed-speak” and the art of constructive ambiguity
Have you ever listened to the public words of a government official and wondered just what the hell it is that he or she is trying to say? Or rather, not to say? Have you ever suspected that government figures deliberately speak in opaque and confusing terms, the better to “say something” without really saying…
On transmitting artistic and spiritual vision
Some years ago as I was searching for a way to introduce poetry to the high school writing and literature classes that I was then teaching — not just certain, selected poets and poems but the entire idea and import of poetry itself — I started telling my students that language can have an alchemical…
Twitter vs. blogs in an age of cheap language
Here’s a nicely nuanced and truly elegant little meditation on the meanings (note the plural) of Twitter in an age of universally blogified (in the bad sense) writing — with equal attention given to the latter phenomenon. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of…
The dumbing of American political speech has truly apocalyptic implications
NPR reported it this morning, and I listened with rapt attention during my commute to work: It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a…
Recommend Reading 5
This week’s recommended reading includes articles and essays about: collapse and global crisis; the manipulation of economics and politics by wealthy elites; the mysteries of consciousness; current hot-button topics in religion and spirituality; fruitful ways of regarding paranormal phenomena; and the value of working consciously to live a real human life in the midst of…
Bad grammar on PBS: The fall of civilization?
Last night my wife and I watched the new National Geographic documentary “Quest for the Lost Maya” on PBS. At one point the narrator uttered this sentence: Though badly decomposed from the acidic soil, Stephanie can still make out the remains of a human skull, and arm and leg bones. The Maya created a great…
The Zen of Prose Style: Writing can’t be taught (but it can be learned)
Recently, I quoted a jewel of sardonic wisdom from Joseph Epstein on what it takes to become a writer. His words were from seven years ago. In a review essay published just this month, he ups the ante for quotability: After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my…