My Personal Battle With Language

The funny thing about being an editor is that it enables an unnecessary sense of power. Whether you're using AP, APA, or Chicago Manual of Style, you get so used to correcting a particular wording or phrase that it starts to bother you when you see it used incorrectly. Especially if you're not in a position to edit it.

We become so used to adhering to this guide that we start to believe that it was carved into a tablet centuries ago, transcribed from the direct words of God.

I use Chicago Manual of Style at work but am familiar with AP. I belong to a LinkedIn group at my alma mater that features mostly journalists and PR professionals who use AP. One of them started a discussion about AP's recent change to accept "over" as interchangeable with "more than" when referencing quantity. Panic ensued.

I've been trying to wrap my mind around why this irritates people. I think that whatever you were taught as the "right" way to do something as a youth, you imagine was always that way. "Over" was never used for quantity, how can we change it now?

I think the other reason is power. AP editors have continuously corrected persons using "over" instead of "more than." Now they have to let it go, which means they lose a little bit of that power.

My English professor used to say that the word sycophant used to mean "one who smuggles figs." It disappeared for centuries and only reappeared recently with the meaning "a person who praises powerful people in order to get their approval." Language is a synthetic, human invention. We give meaning to words. Not lexicographers or editors, we as a whole. It's a democratic process.

Now that I've gone all high and mighty, I'm still mad about the acceptance of "literally" and it's new, not-so-literal definition. People say "literally" when they mean "figuratively." I'm fine with adding new meanings, except that "literally" and "figuratively" mean the exact opposite. So now, "literally" means "literally" and "the exact opposite of literally."

Thanks to everyone for screwing this up. You couldn't have just said "My head exploded"? You had to say "My head literally exploded" and add extra confusing language that your directionless friends assumed was the right way to use? Your poor grammar spread like a meme and now we have to accept it in our dictionaries.

Thanks, this is literally the worst thing to happen to language.

Average is Over ... Except in the Music Industry

I just finished reading Tyler Cowen's new book Average is Over. I liked it. I tend to like Cowen's work because he has a fairly nonpartisan view of things. He is an economics professor at George Mason University. His writing doesn't infer that our economy is screwed up because of greedy corporations, selfish republicans, or ignorant liberals who need to get government out of the way so the free market can fix everything.

He's unassuming as he tells us where we are and how things are going to be. He doesn't write to scare the reader into voting a particular way (although the picture he paints is rather grim). Instead he tells us what to prepare for.

He basically states that Americans of average abilities and education are going to struggle, along with everyone below them. There is going to be a small group of wealthy people at the top, and the rest of us will be left to scrap. (Well, it's not that bad. He writes a lot about how technology will make it easier, cheaper, and more enjoyable to live with less.)

In addition to reading, I've been listening to a lot of music lately. I like the "Discover" option on Spotify. It suggests music based on what you listen to. It's better than Pandora because I can look at a whole menu of artists and pick which one to listen to, and switch whenever I feel that the artist isn't to my liking.

I like indie bands, but Spotify has turned me into a real music snob. I've discovered amazing groups like Menomena, French Kicks, Kids These Days, and White Denim. These are band that I would have never heard of in the 1990s. You know what the 90s had? Rock Gods like Pearl Jam, U2, and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers that pervaded MTV, top 40 radio, and enormous arenas across the planet. You don't see that anymore. The super band is dead.

Conversely, it's really easy for an obscure, independent band to be discovered through platforms like Spotify. They'll just never be that big. An "average" band is better off now than ever, and popular artists will never be as wealthy as when music distribution was controlled by a few large media corporations.

This is just one industry that contradicts Cowen's prediction, but I wonder how much technology will enable startups that would otherwise have remained dormant. It remains to be seen how much technology will affect the middle class and whether it will be a job killer or a job creator.

What Dexter Tells Us About Our Lust for Violence

My wife and I have been plowing through seasons of Dexter lately. In case you are unfamiliar with the show here is a summation: the protagonist is a serial killer with an insatiable need for blood. But he only kills bad guys and works as a blood spatter analyst for Miami Metro Police where he can discreetly research his next victim.

It's an enjoyable show. There's no memorable lines like "I am the one who knocks," or intriguingly complex characters like pretty much everyone in The Wire. What the show does lack in creativity it makes up for by satisfying a deep human need for violence. How else can the viewer explain rooting for a mass murderer to find his next victim and not get caught?

This need for violence (even if it can be satisfied vicariously) calls up my fascination with cognitive dissonance. In this case, the dissonance comes from:

1. wanting to see violence
2. knowing that violence is wrong.

How does the brain resolve this dissonance? With the concept of justice. We love punishing bad people and that's exactly what Dexter does for us–gives us an outlet for that need. He teaches us that it's okay to watch a person drugged, stabbed to death, dismembered with a bone saw, and vanquished to the bottom of the Atlantic. They were bad. The world is now better off.

Vigilantism is a fun fantasy to indulge in, especially for conservatives. It fits several of the narratives behind conservative thinking:

• Government is inept (in this case, at putting bad people away)
• It justifies the need to own a firearm. Even an assault weapon. Even if one lives in a good neighborhood.
• Capital punishment is effective. 

The unfortunate reality is that Dexter Morgan, Batman, and Dirty Harry are not real. You know who is real? George Zimmerman. You know what form of government is inept? Florida's Stand Your Ground law.

I have no problem with people owning guns to protect themselves or for recreational use. I have a problem with vigilantism, with people looking for trouble. It's a state of mind that does more harm than good, and it stems from our need for violence.

I don't know if shows like Dexter are part of the problem or part of the solution. If they feed into the vigilante narrative or satisfy it so more George Zimmermans don't have to go roaming their neighborhoods with a gun, looking for someone to use it on. I am a big proponent of self awareness and I just hope that more people become mindful of the emotions that drive their actions.

The New Print Ad Strategy

I'm reading though ESPN the Magazine and I get to a spread that has an interview with Eagles quarterback Nick Foles on the left. On the right is a layout about Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald. It features a large image of Fitzgerald at practice, a big headline with copy below, a pullout quote, and some snippets and smaller images on a side bar.

It wasn't until I finished reading the "column," when I got to the logo in the bottom left corner, that I realized I had just read an ad for the University of Phoenix. This is a marketing strategy I used to see all the time in Wired magazine but it wasn't until now that I realized how genius it was. Marketers have figured out a way to cut through all the noise–don't design an ad that looks like an ad. Design it to look like what the readers actually want to read.

I'm an ESPN Magazine subscriber. I like sports. I'm not a Cardinals fan but I like Larry Fitzgerald; he seems to have a true passion for the game. After reading this ad, I know that he has an interest in journalism/broadcasting, he sees football as merely one stage in his life, and when his mom was battling cancer he made her a promise that he would keep education as a priority in his life.

I don't feel like I was sold anything. All I did was learn something new about an athlete I admire. More importantly, I actually read the ad. I can't remember the last time I could say that about a magazine ad.

It's becoming more and more difficult to cut through the noise of advertisement and communicate your message. This is a good example of the necessity to tailor your message to sound like what your audience already wants to read.

No one wants to read ads. Ever. Give them something they care about.

Save the Children

Syria gases its own citizens. That's awful. Syria gases its own citizens, some of whom are children. That's demonic. I am disheartened, angered, and tilting toward misanthropic.

Humans reach a deeper level of empathy when children are the victims of slaughter because they're innocent. But what does innocent mean? They have yet to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Children only know what it's like to be a child. They are not racist because they have yet to know what racism means?

We are not children. We're not even adults. We're patriots, democrats, evangelical Christians, pro-life, limited government, vegan, ivy-league educated, and left brained. Aging is an exponential number of labels and definitions and ways of distinguishing "me" from "them."

Why is it so torturous to watch an eight-year-old girl holding a "God Hates Fags" sign? Because she's too young to make her own decision to be a bigot. She’s too innocent to submit her life to dogmatism. Like Salman Rushdie once wrote, “Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.” (If you agree, you should be equally repulsed by seeing a newborn in a New York Yankees onesie.)

When a child dies because someone's label conflicted with someone else's label, we see the ugly beast in the mirror. Syria's civil war, like any battle, is a war of ideas. The deaths of innocent children remind us how much we get caught up in our labels and, for a moment, we envy their freedom from the straight jacket of ideas that we all wear.

We can never return to that innocence. We can only live vicariously through youth sports, playgrounds, public beaches, and any place where a kid is free of our restrictions that keep them from being kids.

Have you ever watched a kid in their element? They're excellent at it. We're still not good at being adults. We're still figuring it out. We wish we could go back to subsisting solely on the Tree of Life. Every time we take away a child's innocence – through war, indoctrination, sodomy – we get farther away from Eden.

Storytelling and Why Reading is Easier than Writing

The craft of writing is similar to social media management. Because everyone can do it, everyone thinks they can do it well.

Banging out 300 words of brochure copy, a letter from the president, or a 1,000 word feature story takes more than the amount of time it takes to read said copy. In fact, there is probably a figure out there that translates reading time to project time. For instance, if it takes you five minutes to read a story, it probably took five hours to complete. Especially when you factor in all the interviews, revisions, layout, and the muse. The latter is what is often left out. It has been said that one's writing is 90 percent of what they have read and 10 percent of what they are currently reading. As much as I like to think the genesis of all my ideas come from yours truly, they actually come from other ideas I've read or heard that have been filtered through my mind. Blah, blah blah, Inception reference. My point is that I need to be constantly reading good writing and learning about new ideas and new technology to have more meat for my writing.

The editing process is another brutal and thankless endeavor. No one notices when you are good at it, only when you screw up. Remember that time one of your readers called up and and said, "Excellent job on that magazine! I didn't find a single grammatical mistake." No? That's because it never happened in the history of the world.

It's perhaps because it is so easy to read through a magazine or brochure or web story that people assume it must be easy to create. "Oh, you wrote a 350 word story about some student and posted it to the website? What else did you do with the rest of your morning?" Never mind the relationships I had to build to even get that story, the time I spent tracking down the student, the lengthy interview process because the soft-spoken student did not want to talk, or the part-time photographer I transformed into to take the shot.

But it goes even deeper than that. I'm not just firing off stories for print, web, and media to fill my day. I'm building a brand. I'm telling the story of the institution. I seek student stories and ask questions that fit the mold of what I want the story of my employer to be.

Building a brand is not an overnight process. It is a quilt sewn together with strategic content. This is a fast moving digital world. The tone and delivery is changing. There is so much noise that only those in a particular key are going to be heard. Only those with their finger on the pulse of what that key is are going to know how to play.

Why Fear Makes Beautiful Art

James Salter published a new book this year. But so what? The man is 87. His most popular novel, The Hunters, was published in 1957. Chuck Palahniuk, a comparatively young whipper-snapper at 51, is supposed to publish a book this year. But his popularity has been in decline since 1996's Fight Club. People still read their work, but not with the same fervor as the aforementioned novels. I imagine that if you spoke to either writer, nothing has changed about their approach to writing a novel. So what's different? Why the decline?

One of my favorite bands, The National, released their eighth studio album this year. While it's a great effort, it does not come close to touching the magic they had on Alligator and Boxer. They're still the same band. They obviously still know how to craft music. Why can't they just sound like the used to?

I gleaned some insight about The National from this Grantland piece. Singer Matt Berninger speaks about a peace of mind while recording this record, not caring how it sounded to anyone but himself, and the comfort with what the band has already accomplished–even admitting he'd be fine with the band never recording another album.

I didn't see it at the time of reading the review, but I should have thought "bad omen." I've written before about the power that comes from two alpha males in a band that don't necessarily get along. As sick as it sounds, I'd rather hear Matt say "Recording this album almost broke the band up. Bryce and I daily got into fights over how songs should sound. I don't know if I have it in me to do this again."

Are there any exceptions to these writers and bands that can defy the gradual decline in their work? Off the top of my head, David Foster Wallace comes to mind. After reading his biography, I got the sense that he was obsessed with what other people thought about him. Writing, for him, was like torture. He always thought he had these huge expectations to live up to. It's odd that, for such a celebrated author, he really only wrote three novels. But they were all quality pieces of work. Infinite Jest was probably the best novel of Wallace's generation, but his fans will admit that his posthumous piece The Pale King was probably his best work.

So why did Wallace's work continue to improve over his 20-year writing career, despite his fame and success. My guess: he was afraid of failure. I think a part of his mental illness was that he suffered from an insatiable need to please others. He stressed out over everything he wrote because he thought it might fail.

This fear is what drives young, hungry bands. It's the reason so many great bands spilt up or give up. They either fret too much over making the perfect album or they become comfortable just making music. I don't think money changes them or they "sellout" by making more accessible, radio friendly music. They're just no longer afraid of returning to their old jobs.

Too much success leads people to thinking that their success is the result of raw talent. The hard work is no longer necessary because they know what they're doing now. Success leads to complacency and the gradual decline of all great artists. Like Neil Young said, "It's better to burn out than it is to rust."