Regardless of your political opinion, it’s safe to say 2017 has already been a year worth remembering. A controversial wave started rolling in last year, and the American people are surfing its surface around the web in all different directions.
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02 06 2015
How to Use (and Avoid) Obscure Words
If you are someone who enjoys writing, you probably take pride in using your skill and knowledge of the language to craft a message that communicates exactly the intended point. The raw materials at your disposal—words—are not unlike those of a sculptor; some are easier to work with than others. So when you can master the harder materials—more obscure words—you might feel a special satisfaction.
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26 05 2015
Tell Me a Story
I was twenty when the overwhelming urge to head to the Southwest struck. I was a junior in college, living on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, and I was hungry to explore the alien landscape of slickrock and sandstone, to see arches and mesas and unimaginable rock formations with my own eyes. The canyons were calling to me, so in the spring of 1998, I took a Greyhound bus from Maine to Utah.
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Do you engage in risky writing? Or, more to the point, should you?
I’m not talking about Charlie Hebdo-style cartoons, or even the kind of novel that forced Salman Rushdie into hiding for years. I’m talking about garden-variety edginess for rhetorical effect: strong language, subtle references to sex, drugs, alcohol, bodily functions, taboos of various kinds… you get the idea. Where do you draw the line? How far (and how often) do you cross over it before a little bit becomes too much?
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While editing a stack of documents a few months back, I ran across the phrase “top of mind.”
“Ugh, awkward,” I thought, and changed it. But then it popped up again a few docs later from a different writer, and then again while researching. Amid my growing suspicions, I managed to Google it with slightly shaky hands.
To my horror, I found that “top of mind” was a thing — an actual accepted phrase used in business every day by who knows how many people, and this despite its ungainly cadence and oh-so-wrongness. And top of mind is far from the only culprit. We also have nuggets like “vertical market” and leverage used as a verb in the wrong way. Also, nuggets.
Companies now have robust offerings instead of choices and they leverage solutions instead of selling stuff. And business jargon itself is
