Off the Hoof

Posts About Language

Breaking News: Douche is Down 300%

It’s been quite a busy week here at Mule. When we launched Unsuck It on Wednesday afternoon, we were expecting excitement, intrigue, snark, and even some opposition. But, we were not expecting the incredible response we received in less than two days!

Within the last 48 hours, we’ve received over 1300 submissions. Some of them are hilarious, and some of them are clever. Some of them are duplicates, and some of them are perverted spam. We have a lot of unsucking to do over the next few weeks, but we’re thrilled to know you like the site, you’re using it, and you want to contribute to our war on suck.

Please enjoy this fan art from Fernando Espinoza at Slide about the Social Media Guru entry.

Wow. Thank you, Internet! Especially these folks:

Written by Nicole Jones on August 13, 2010 with 3 comments |

Unsuck It

A couple of months ago, Jason Santa Maria called upon the Internet for assistance:

Can one of you wonderful content strategists start a Tumblr site, post awful business speak (“boil the ocean”), and provide alternatives?

Shortly thereafter, we set up a Tumblr account for translating douchey business jargon into understandable English. That started well, but we wanted to do more than Tumblr allows. We want Unsuck It to reflect our passion for clear, direct language, using words to communicate rather than obscure. We also wanted to add enough space to entries for sample sentences, and better pagination for the archives.

So we built it ourselves. Here it is, ready for you to play with: unsuck-it.com.

The new site lets you share a term on Twitter, e-mail a douchebag who used it, or suggest a new term we have yet to unsuck. Enjoy.

Written by Nicole Jones on August 12, 2010 with 3 comments |

Çeci n’est pas une histoire

Yesterday, Shawna shared an article by Gary Goldhammer with me. It starts as an apology, and ends as an effective kick in the ass.

I think these points are worth considering:

I took what used to be called “stories” and changed them into “content.” I used technology to communicate, and in doing so turned communication into something technological – not “read” or “watched” but rather “consumed.”

The more that people like me use words like Content, Engagement, and Post to represent how we tell stories and connect with each other, the more distance we create.

Drop the veil.

Be real.

[P]lay around, do something new, have adventures, fail often.

Tell a story and stand for something.

Written by Nicole Jones on May 28, 2010 with 0 comments |

“Copy As Interface” Deck Now Available to You at Home!

By popular demand, Erika has posted her Web 2.0 Expo presentation, “Copy As Interface” on Slideshare. You’re welcome.

Photo by Matt Jones

Written by Katie Spence on April 29, 2008 with 1 comment |

What would Leslie do?

The great and wonderful Leslie Harpold passed away in December of last year leaving the world a sadder place without her, but a richer place for having known her. Over on 43 Folders, Lance Arthur, one of her closest friends is writing a series called What Would Leslie Do.

Here are parts one and two.

You’ll be richer for her advice. We all were.

Written by Mike Monteiro on November 14, 2007 |

Dollywood Values

This week’s Economist on Dollywood, and Dolly herself:

As a girl, she thought the town hooker in her make-up and stilettos was the prettiest thing she had ever seen. “She was trash,” Ms Parton tells interviewers, “And I thought: That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

As I grow older and supposedly wiser, I’ve come to understand that Dolly Parton’s greatest gift is not, well, THOSE, but rather that voice; that wonderful voice and the tone that comes out of it. That’s the voice I’d want to hear bad news in, it wouldn’t be so bad.

Written by Mike Monteiro on November 12, 2007 with 0 comments |

Words Words Words

Something funny about this whole Web 2.0 thing…much of what makes the experience is made of written words (setting aside the ongoing radical redefinition of “written”).

Wikis, blogs, social networks, and so much of that juicy UGC (shudder).

Interactions, meaning, and value are built with language, especially when one aims to be device-independent.

Text is the most efficient and least disruptive means for us humans to handle the tremendous amount of complex information coming at us from different sources. (Imagine your 10 open IMs as concurrent spoken conversations.)

Short bursts of text are highly addictive, like wordcrack. Pithy headlines catch our eye. We won’t stop checking Twitter at the bar. And lolcats propagate by exploiting our latent longing to get Hooked on Phonics. (See: Anil Dash, occasional lolcat critic.)

So, if you are beavering away to create the next winning web application, you could be a follow fashion monkey with your tone and text, the last in line for a massage. Or you could strike your own unique balance between appealing novelty and useful convention.

The latter will help you win friends and influence people.

A couple weeks ago I went to London in search of the perfect $27 beer, and to give a talk about this very subject. (Thanks Brian Oberkirch and CARSONIFIED! for inviting me) Audio and slides are now available. There are some funny counter-examples and a photo of a half-naked man in a rabbit mask to sweeten the deal.

Written by Erika Hall on October 16, 2007 |

A Pulitzer in PowerPoint*

Last week Pulitzer Prize winner author Robert Olen Butler, who I must admit I hadn’t heard of since I only read comic books, was kind enough to email his graduate students, who we hope must contain at least one willing co-ed, and inform them of the reasons for his impending divorce from his non Pulitzer Prize winning wife Elizabeth Dewberry, who I also hadn’t heard of. (I doubt either of them, however, would approve of that introductory run-on sentence.)

As Mr. Butler himself says:

You can feel free to use any part or all of this email to do so. I really appreciate your help.

I’m here to help, Bob.

Sadly our centers of learning are preoccupied more with their own internal affairs and passive-aggressive takedown efforts and less with teaching our college-aged children any sort of actual literary skills. I’ve therefore condensed the finer points of Mr. Butler’s literary missive (which should deservedly earn him Pulitzer number two, or so help me I will scream!) into a few bit-sized portions of Powerpoint suitable for the less-than-literary among us, including myself:

Excerpt from a PPT...

* Truth be told, I used Keynote, not PowerPoint; but the stronger title demanded I go with the better-known, if shittier, tool. N’est ce pas?

Update: Dear Mother of God. He wrote a follow-up.

Written by Mike Monteiro on August 5, 2007 |

Wiccans

From this month’s Harper’s Index:

Minimum number of Wiccans currently serving in the military: 1,870

Minimum?!? I can understand ‘minimum amount of coffee needed before speaking to people’ (one pot) and ‘minimum amount of kidneys needed to to live’ (one) but just how many Wiccans does the military need?

Written by Mike Monteiro on July 23, 2007 with 3 comments |

How To Visit San Francisco

In response to my good friend, and ex-San Franciscan, Anil Dash’s post on How To Visit New York, and because we are currently in the midst of All-Star Fever (Catch It!), I present to you a guide to visiting San Francisco.

But first off, I must ask you to bear in mind that I, like many of our citizens, am not native to this place but immigrated here not too long ago. So I can vouch that, yes, many of us are weird, although not as much as we think; and no, you should not be comfortable with most, if any, of it.

Hopefully by following these short and helpful guidelines you will show up prepared and enjoy your time here. Because it really is a nice place, once you get past most of the people.

I know it’s hot where you live, but it’s cold here right now. It doesn’t matter what time of year you might be reading this; it is ALWAYS cold here. Except in October. In October it is warm for about a week. Pack a sweater, a hooded sweatshirt (known to the locals as a ‘hoodie’), some long pants, mittens and a coat. This will save you from purchasing a Blue and Yellow Fleet fleece jacket at Pier 39 and getting your wallet or purse stolen on that very cute F-line.

Oh, and since we’re talking about what to wear: please stop with the hiking boots. Yes, we have hills, but they were paved a long time ago.

What to call it. Before you get here you should realize what ‘here’ is called. Your safest bet is just referring to it as ‘San Francisco.’ White collar tech workers who moved here during the dot com boom like to pass off as locals by cringing when you refer to it as ‘Frisco’, but honestly, that’s what the oldest of the locals call it. If you consider yourself an ultra hip individual you can refer to it as ‘The City’, but please never ‘San Fran.’

Don’t rent a car. You’ll spend your entire visit trying to park it. Take BART from the airport. It’s carpeted! And if you wanna go to the Mission, or Downtown, or the East Bay BART will do you right. If you’re going elsewhere, though, you’ll have to take MUNI. MUNI is awesome if only because it manages to unite the entire city in our hatred towards it.

We have gay people. Don’t be afraid; they’re not the weird ones. The nice Police Officer you asked for directions last night? Yeah. His name is Bob, he has a cute wife named Cindy, who also has a girlfriend named Pam, and they both share a transgendered robot lover named Chris, but only on Wednesdays and depending on Cindy’s cycle because she’s trying to get pregnant so the Chinese girl they adopted last year and named Satchell will have a friend to play with. They all met because they’re part of a Spiritual Raver society. No, not THAT Spiritual Raver society, the one that splintered off from that one.

All the good food comes in tubes. Get yourself to The Mission for a good burrito. Make it ‘super’ and don’t pay more than $7. Please don’t pick and choose what goes in it, just let them make it. And please don’t ask them how spicy it will be, they’ll know from your Blue and Gold Fleet fleece jacket to make it mild.

And speaking of eating; remember the vegetarian hippie you made friends with that first year in college because he always seemed to have a big sticky ball of hash to share? And remember how you took him home for Thanksgiving and your Mom spent the entire meal trying to convince him that turkey wasn’t meat because it isn’t beef? Well, most of us are vegetarians. We’re happy to invite vegans into our home because, hey, more ice cream for us! And we’re curious about the raw food eaters and like to tease them about whether sun tea is actually cooked or not, but we’re a little afraid of the freegans if only because we don’t want people going through our garbage and finding our copious amounts of porn.

We have no homeless people. Thanks to our lovely mayor’s Care Not Cash program homeless people are now obsolete.

It’s expensive here. If a local tells you how much their rent is they do NOT mean yearly. This will shock everyone except New Yorkers who pay even higher rents for the privilege of showering in their kitchen.

And most importantly; people here greet each other differently than in other places. Growing up in Philadelphia, when you were walking by someone and you happened to make contact you were both expected to nod towards each other. It wasn’t exactly friendly as much it was an ‘acknowledgment’ that neither was going to hurt the other one. When I moved to Austin I was completely thrown when I nodded at someone and they replied with a hearty and friendly “Hello there!!” I’m guessing that wherever you’re from the typical greeting might be somewhere in between those two.

In San Francisco, should you make eye contact with someone and either nod or say hello, you should expect them to turn their head slightly away from you, turn their nose up a bit and pucker their mouth as if you’ve just inserted a small lemon into it. Try to remember that they don’t mean to be rude, they’re just thinking of the excellent gas mileage they’re getting on their Toyota Prius.

(Photo by the great Scott Beale.)

Written by Mike Monteiro on July 9, 2007 with 29 comments |

How To Visit New York

Legendary blogger and LOLcat enthusiast Anil Dash is starting a series on How to Visit New York. Today’s primer on basics nails my number two peeve about San Francisco quite well:

If you are walking on the sidewalks and get winded because you’re not used to hoofing it so much, be sure to get out of the way before you just stop; Pulling to a halt on a sidewalk is the equivalent of stopping your car right in the middle of traffic.

San Franciscans will come to a sudden stop ANYWHERE; on the sidewalk, on the stairs, and most frustratingly—in doorways. I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years and boiled it down to this: Most large cities that I’ve been in have SOME understanding of a social contract and of how their behavior impacts upon the other people in their densely populated proximity. San Francisco, however, is run on the premise that individual entitlement supercedes the social contract.

Anil has inspired me to write up my own guide on How To Visit San Francisco which I will hopefully post this evening. It will include my number one pet peeve about the city. You’ll enjoy it!

Written by Mike Monteiro on July 9, 2007 with 1 comment |

Everyone Listens to Walt Mossberg

We recently had the pleasure of working with Walt Mossberg on the All Things D site. He was a tough client, in that he called us out on any bad design choices he saw and pushed us to do better work. I love clients like that.

The New Yorker has a 6 page article (I know this because they still paginate the damn things) on Walt today that’s well worth reading.

The opening sentence of his inaugural column, sixteen years ago, was “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.”

What a HUGE thing to say sixteen years ago.

Written by Mike Monteiro on May 7, 2007 |

The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the most difficult book I’ve ever read. Sparse and cruel in both its story and prose style. The basic story is about a father and son who are walking south in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The details of that apocalypse are vague and don’t really matter. The story is about the father and son.

The story is gut wrenching, and at the same time beautiful in its telling. Cormac McCarthy has stripped away every piece of useless punctuation he could until all that was left was absolutely unstrippable.

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesnt fire? It was to fire. What if it doesnt fire? Can you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.

Having a son about the same age as the protagonist makes this an incredibly difficult book to read. This isn’t the kind of book you can’t put down; it’s the kind of book you HAVE to put down. It’s exhausting. I can manage about ten pages before I get completely overwhelmed and depressed.

That’s good writing.

Written by Mike Monteiro on March 10, 2007 with 2 comments |

R.I.P. Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard, the French theorist who made my college experience a living nightmare, passed away today at the ripe old age of 77.

However, since I didn’t see him die it didn’t really happen, did it? (See, I WAS paying attention in class.)

Written by Mike Monteiro on March 6, 2007 |

Daptosaurus

In 1931 Barnum Brown discovered a new type of small, meat-eating dinosaur. He named it Daptosaurus, meaning “active lizard”. Problem is, Barnum Brown really loved field work. He wasn’t so much about the paperwork that followed.

According to the rules of paleontology, you get to name any dinosaur you discover, but to make it stick you have to write about it. You have to publish. Barnum never got around to publishing anything about the Daptosaurus, and the dinosaur went nameless until 1969 when he was baptized as Deinonychus.

Publishing, of course, was a much bigger pain in the ass in 1931 than it is now. For example, this grammatical nightmare will get published by pressing a button at the bottom of this form. And I’m hoping that this post serves me as a reminder that I really should write more, because I typically enjoy the field work more, but there’s a lesson to be learned from Barnum Brown and his Daptosaurus.

I’d also like to thank Henry for bringing the Daptosaurus to my attention. We’re all up in dinosaurs this weekend.

Written by Mike Monteiro on March 4, 2007 with 1 comment |

How many copywriters does it take to screw up a metaphor?

These posters went up all over MUNI recently. Here's how they fail:

The poster features an incandescent lightbuld and a compact flourescent lightbulb. Let's call them 'old' and 'new' for short. The old lighbulb is labeled 'SUV', the new one is labeled 'hybrid'.

The problem is that the new lightbulb is an evolution of the old one, and the old one in its time was a very good idea. Before lightbulbs we burned whale fat to light our homes at night, we went to bed earlier and we read less books for lack of light. Lightbulbs effectively made us smarter. The SUV was NEVER a good idea, they're an abomination of fuel consumption and encourage lazy driving habits. The hybrid is an evolution of the car, not the SUV.

So I'd accept 'car' over the old lighbulb.

You had two words to get right on this ad and you blew half of them. Good work.

Written by Mike Monteiro on July 25, 2006 with 6 comments |