Flack's Revenge

1 Space, 2 Space, Red Face, Blue Face (Slate Rants on Punctuation and Brings PR into Fray)

My job as a senior manager at a PR agency requires me to do a fair amount of editing and writing.

Yet I am an engineer by education, and my training in these things has been mostly on-the-job (see my previous post about tips for effective writing). I am a believer in the importance of getting these things right; but am not nearly as strict and excitable as some others are when it comes to grammar and style.

Yes I am sure you have all run across the grammar taskmaster, an interesting and amusing breed (often unintenionally funny, as they tend to be rather humorless).  This is a long way of pointing out an article in Slate that my colleague Heather sent to me.  It rails against the practice of uisng two spaces after the period in a sentence.

I have heard arguments for both sides. Writing for Slate, Farhrad Manjoo makes a pretty convincing case for one space (I always though that using two makes the text look a little less cramped).  The article brings PR into the fray as a-two spaces offender.  Here is an excerpt:

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.* You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces.

A very interesting and informative article, but not a quick read - did Farhad need to (ahem) use so much space to make the point?

 

Slang vs. Tech Jargon: So different? (I'm Just Sayin')

An article in the NY Times last month described how the Internet is the shortening the shelf life of slang. According to the story:

The number of slang dictionaries is growing, both online and off, not to mention social networking media that invent and discard words, phrases and memes at the speed of broadband. The life of slang is now shorter than ever, say linguists, and what was once a reliable code for identifying members of an in-group or subculture is losing some of its magic... The Internet “is robbing slang of a lot of its sociolinguistic exclusionary power,” said Robert A. Leonard, a linguistics professor at Hofstra in Hempstead, N.Y... widespread understanding is the opposite of what slang is about. 

This got me to wondering whether the same thing might be happening with tech jargon.  After all, don't us industry folk use jargon as "a reliable code for identifying members of an in-group?"  One could also argue that tech jargon runs through the mill much more quickly these days.

The great big elephant in the room in tech is that words are used to exclude and impress.  People have conversations and feel each other out in terms of what they know and what they can get away with saying.  It is equal part bluffer's game, showboating, and obfuscation.

Charting the trajectory of specific words is not easy, according to the article.

Tracking a word’s arc from hip to lame is notoriously difficult, especially because different social groups grab hold of different terms at different times.

It described words and phrases that are in decline:

And the site Gawker recently tried without success to ban the phrase “I’m just sayin,’ ” which has become ubiquitous on blogs and Twitter as a way of defanging — disingenuously, perhaps — a potentially confrontational statement.

I reflected on a conversation I had with my daughter the other day about pop music.  It seems that many lame songs these days have over-produced sound effects thrown in that are very irritating.  I told her that, just like good steak, songs that are really good should not need such spicing up.

Similarly, marketers with quality products should not have to rely on jargon or marketing speak to jazz up what they are selling. 

Instead of taking pains to ensure you are using the jargon d' jour, why not just speak plainly? Would this be such a bad thing?  I'm just sayin.