Sustainability Reporting on a Global Scale
Posted: August 29, 2011 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative | Tags: Buckman, business writing, green marketing, GRI, sustainability Leave a comment »
Here is Buckman’s new sustainability report which adheres to the strict guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative. Just one of many sustainability projects I have written over the past few years. When companies use the same global standards of reporting, it is much easier to see just how good they are at being corporate citizens. Here are a few pages. For the entire 48-page report (bless your heart), just click on the cover shot above.
A new look for FedEx
Posted: August 24, 2011 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative, signage | Tags: Arena marketing, FedEx, hockey, Oden, Pittsburgh Penguins, sports marketing Leave a comment »
This is just one of the big and bold walls you’ll see at the CONSOL Energy Center in Pittsburgh, home of the Penguins. I worked with designer Spencer King at Oden on these. This is the look of things to come for FedEx.
A few new poems
Posted: August 22, 2011 Filed under: Publishing, writing | Tags: Poetry, Tidal Basin Review Leave a comment »In the new issue of Tidal Basin Review, a Washington D.C.-based journal published in print and online. My work begins on page 84.
My article from Sail Magazine
Posted: July 18, 2011 Filed under: Off-Topic Meanderings | Tags: Boating, Tenn-Tom Waterway 2 Comments »Has it really been eight years since I took my son and father down the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway? Yep. Enough time for my son to have graduated from college and my Dad to be long-since retired. There’s no online version of this article. Hope you can read it okay. Let me know.
Barely South Review » Disappointment at Shiloh
Posted: April 19, 2011 Filed under: Literature, writing | Tags: Barely South Review, Fiction, writing Leave a comment »
A writer can’t write advertising all the time. Here’s a little short story of mine just published by Old Dominion University–online.
Barely South Review » Disappointment at Shiloh.
Wordnut makes contribution to this year’s Judges’ Choice Award winner
Posted: February 22, 2011 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative | Tags: Advertising, advertising strategy, creative, FedExFamily House, video Leave a comment »The marketing firm Oden sent out a holiday card this year featuring a large QR code. Recipients scanned the code with their smart phones or simply visited the website provided and they were treated to this unique video, which won three awards at this year’s Memphis Addy Awards, including the Judges’ Choice Award. I helped with the script and the messaging. The real genius is in the painstaking stop-action animation and whimsical props, a collaboration of Bret Terwilleger and photographer Jerry Plunk.
Tweaking Twain
Posted: January 5, 2011 Filed under: Language, Literature, Southern Words, Vocabulary | Tags: banned books, Censorship, Huckleberry Finn, Literature, Mark Twain, n-word Leave a comment »
New Edition Of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Will Eliminate Offensive Words : The Two-Way : NPR.
Read the story linked above and see what you think. Here’s what I think:
For years, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned in many schools because it contains the n-word. To rectify that, some scholars are coming out with an edition that replaces the n-word with “slave.” It also does away with “Injun.” I understand the motivation–to get Huck back into the schools of Backwater, Alabama, where it can do some good. But I think it does a disservice to the literature itself and to history, and it waters down the whole transformation Huck undergoes when he begins to see Jim as a full-fledged human being in a world of conflicting moral codes. In Huck’s world, the moral thing to do was to return Jim to his rightful owner. But in the end he couldn’t do it, declaring that he would “burn in hell” and help Jim go free. “I knowed he was white inside,” Huck says, in his own ethnocentric sense of humanity. This is not a racist book; it is a story about racist people.
Conflicted a bit, at first, about this tweaking of Twain, I decided to ask the author, Mark Twain, what his feelings on the issue are, and then ask a high school student in Backwater, Alabama, his take.
First up, Mark Twain:
“The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
Ah, good point. Now the student:
“What the f-word? Do they think we’re G-word d-word babies? What a bunch of s-word.”
And if that’s not a good enough indication of the general sentiment, you can refer to NPR’s poll asking readers if they think it is okay to change the text if it will introduce more young people to Huck Finn. With more than 12,000 readers participating, 4.19% say it is okay and 95.81% think it is still the wrong thing to do.
This isn’t the first time the n-word has been expunged from a prominent book. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None was originally Ten Little Indians in the US and Ten Little Niggers in the UK. You can go here for more information about that. The use of the n-word in that book was unimportant–merely referring to an old nursery rhyme that gives the book its murderous structure (the verse that the guests mysteriously receive became “Ten Little Soldiers”). The title was also racist in every sense. But in Huck Finn, the n-word is used some 219 times; it’s part of the book’s fabric. It makes the characters who they are, the times what they were, and the book what it is. The fact that the story is narrated by Huck, himself, makes things even more complicated. When you alter these words, you alter the character of the storyteller. Who do we think we are, the author?
For additional insight, here’s a good article on the San Francisco Chronicle blog: The N-word, Huck Finn and You
Wordcracker: Copywriter
Posted: January 4, 2011 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative, Wordcracker, writing | Tags: Advertising, business writing, Copywriting & Creative, creative, freelance writing, marketing, Origin of copywriter, writing 1 Comment »An advertising writer is called a copywriter. But why? Why “copy?” The story starts a long time ago, even before advertising as we know it. While “copy” can mean an imitation or facsimile, it can also refer–according my trusty Oxford English Dictionary–to the thing being copied. A copy, then, can be “the original writing, work of art, etc., from which a copy is made.” We can find this usage as far back as 1481.
So what does this have to do with advertising writing? Plenty. Fast forward to the moveable type printing press and the printed newspapers it spawned. The manuscript written (and later typed) by the news writer was called a copy because, we can now deduce, it would soon be copied by the typesetter and printer. In fact, a “copy boy” was often employed to run the manuscript from writer to editor to typesetter. Eventually, the “a” was dropped, so a copy became simply “copy,” used in much the same way we use the word “text.”
So, you keep asking, what does this have to do with advertising writing? Everything! To pay the journalists and the pressmen and make a profit, newspapers sold advertising (why do you think advertising courses are so often buried in our colleges’ schools of journalism?). Someone had to write the verbiage–the copy–for the ads they sold. And the copywriter–and a title that differentiated him from the journalist or news writer–was born.
The unfortunate similarity of “copywriter” and “copyright” causes consternation for many. You’ve got to be a lawyer to deal with copyright issues, and that I am certainly not. In fact, I have a hard enough time just coming up with a company name or a snappy slogan that has the potential to be copyrighted. Try coming up with an original website domain, for example. It isn’t easy. Because of this confusion and because not that many people know where the word “copy” comes from in the first place, I prefer to say I am an advertising writer or a marketing writer. And when I am feeling particularly smug, I simply say that I’m a writer, knowing that it will evoke all sorts of romantic notions in people’s heads. That, of course, often backfires, and they ask, “Oh, anything I might have read?”
Probably not. Not yet, anyway.
Cock a hoop and other expressions
Posted: December 9, 2010 Filed under: Expressions, Language | Tags: beyond the pale, cock the hoop, Expressions, swing the lead 1 Comment »In his response to yesterday’s entry, a good and witty reader strung together several archaic expressions that sparked my curiosity. Here they are and where they came from.
Cock a hoop
“Cock a hoop,” as a verb phrase, means: to remove the spigot (the cock) from a barrel or cask and place it on top (the hoop), thus allowing the drink to flow freely. A bit like having an open bar today, but messier.
It can also be used as an adjective. If someone was cock-a-hoop or cock-on-hoop, they were “at the height of mirth and jollity,” according to a 1690 explanation in the OED. Seems to me they would be dead drunk. Anyway, what a great expression! Here in this 1529 reference, setting cock on hoop seems to be a literal description and not yet an expression: “They . . .set them downe and dryncke well for our saviours sake, sette cock on hoope, and fyll in all the cuppes at ones and then lette Chrystes passion paye for all the scotte.”
However, the OED warns that “on the hoop” was used on many pub signs with and without “cock.” There was an Eagle on the Hoop, a swan, a hen, a crown, a bell, and many other things on the hoop. So, “cock” could be referring to the fowl. In such a case, nobody really knows what “on the hoop” means. It could just be that those pub owners no longer understood the origin of the phrase–the point of my previous blog entry, really. And since valves are still referred to as cocks in many applications and barrels are, indeed, made with staves and hoops, I have no reason to doubt our definition. In fact, I’ll drink to it.
Swinging the lead
If someone is swinging the lead, they are not working very hard. It refers to depth sounders on boats whose job it was to drop a lead line to the bottom, measure the water’s depth by counting the knots or marks in the line, and then call out the depth to the captain. By the mark, five! Or in Samuel Clemens’ case, Mark twain! Some say the phrase evolved because lead sounding was considered an easy job. Lead is heavy, so I’m thinking that it wasn’t easy. In fact, it was often referred to as “heaving the lead.” Sounding had to be carried out in every kind of weather. The cavity in the bottom had to be filled with tallow which would pick up sediment from the bottom and allow the sounder to ascertain the nature of the terrain below. The ship and crew often depended on the sounder’s accuracy for their very lives.
Others say it comes from swinging the lead over the side but not really letting it down unless a superior was looking. Maybe so. That would certainly be lazy, but I wonder about that one, too. Seems a big risk to allow a ship to hit ground just because you didn’t want to haul in the lead. Of course, slacking off every five or six soundings wouldn’t hurt, would it?
Regardless, if you must swing the lead, it’s best not to get caught doing it, and certainly it’s something to guard against after cocking a hoop.
Beyond the pale
Obviously swinging the lead after setting the cock on the hoop is going beyond the pale, but what does that mean? Pale, in this case, refers to a palisade or fence, which is made up pales or pickets. Going beyond the pale is going beyond accepted boundaries.
Expressions become much richer when you know their origin. For more good fun here at Wordnut, check out More expressions than you can shake a stick at.
