Word Wise

Phone Lex

When it comes to telephones, a lot has changed since the days of “one-ringy-dingy, two-ringy-dingy." It used to be that we had a phone – okay, some of us had a princess phone – a phone number and that was that. Today? Well, you know. Not only are we talking on our phones constantly, we’re also talking about our phones, referencing phone numbers from New York to New Delhi, and encouraging people to call toll-free numbers, among many other phone-related things. As new technologies have been introduced, so, too, have the ways in which we refer to them in our writing. Cell phone is two words. And cell has two Ls. It would be fun if more than one BlackBerry could properly be BlackBerries, but it’s not. It’s BlackBerrys. While it’s iPhone, it’s IPhone if it starts a sentence. Hot line is two words, too. Smartphone is one word and lowercase unless it starts a sentence as it does here. The initialism for Voice over Internet Protocol is VoIP, styled just like that. Bluetooth is a proper noun and always capitalized. Toll free is two words, hyphenated when used as a modifier (a toll-free number, but you can dial toll free). While we’re on the subject of toll-free numbers, you should not add a 1 before the number, as in 1-800-555-1212, since, as the Washington Post’s copy desk chief Bill Walsh wrote in his masterpiece, Lapsing Into a Comma, “there’s no need to … belabor the fact that everybody, and not just most people, has to add a 1 at the beginning.” In the United States, we use hyphens in phone numbers – call me at 312-222-3333 – and not periods, no matter how soigné you think it may look. SMS stands for short message service but no one knows that so it’s better to just write SMS or “text message.” When referencing phone numbers for a global audience, from the United States include 011, which indicates a number outside North America; a country code; in some cases a regional, city or area code; and, finally, the local phone number itself. A list of country codes can be found here. But even better, at this site you choose the country from which the call is originating, the country it’s going to, and in return you get the exact numbers you need to use to precede the local number. For instance, if I want to call a colleague in my company’s office in Paris, France, I’d choose the U.S. and Paris, and it tells me I need to write 011 33 1 and then the local number. Voila!

Strategy Shmategy

I don’t often strategically write a post about one word, but I’m thinking strategically today and, strategically speaking, the supposedly strategic use of the word "strategic" is not strategically helpful. The word means “relating to or concerned with a plan of action.” So to sound strategically intelligent, everyone in PR these days seems to think that strategically it’s a good strategy to call everything they do – every decision, every phone call, every everything – strategic, lest they be accused of acting willy-nilly. But like the tired-as-all-get-out “integrated” and “seamless,” the word “strategic” has lost its oomph. It no longer implies, strategically or otherwise, that whatever is being done is being done on purpose and with an objective in mind. It no longer has the force of its intended meaning. So inured are we to its presence that our eyes gloss over it without even taking it in. Instead, the word just sits there on a page forlornly, taking up space. Through nonstrategic overuse, misuse, and abuse, a perfectly good and powerful word is no longer powerful. We have forgotten to strategize.

Today's read & other stuff - The Hammer Comes to Glamour

According to Gawker.com, life got a little less glamourous today as Conde Nast, fresh from shutting down Gourmet, gave the heave-ho to a half dozen folks at Glamour, all on its sales force. Still, that can't be a good omen for the glamourpusses on the editorial side. One of those let go today was a guy who was on "The Real World: New Orleans." Reality bites.

Probably not following Glamour's lead, The New York Times today announced it's going to cut 8 percent of its newsroom staff - 100 people - by the end of the year. According to the Times itself, the paper "will mail buyout packages to the entire newsroom staff on Thursday. The employees have 45 days to decide whether to apply for the buyout. Under the Newspaper Guild contract that covers most newsroom employees, buyouts generally offer three weeks’ salary for each year of service."

Finally, New York Magazine does a brilliant job of explaining how a news story changes and expands as it moves through people and institutions and other news sources by choosing a random date (Sept. 21) and showing how its top stories - including one about John Edwards' love child, General McChrystal's leaked report on Afghanistan, and the murder of a Yale student - got to actually be that day's top stories. Click here and here for PDFs of the really cool illustrations.

Today's read & other stuff - Shame, Shame, Shame

It's a shame: Gawker has a sad little item about an event at which top chefs (not "Top Chefs") are to honor "the editors, writers and staff of the legendary culinary publication Gourmet magazine," except apparently it's hard to locate any of them. (Did anyone check the masthead?) Event planners even posted an ad on Craig's List.

They should be ashamed: French Vogue this month features a model in blackface. "The exoticism of the model is supposed to be the story but it ends up being nothing,” New Yorker magazine writer Hilton Als told the Daily Beast, which reported on this. “It’s not offensive, it’s just the scraping of the bottom of the fashion world barrel to come up with something." 

Time Sensitive

All sorts of documents we write include the time – when an event starts or stops or a new service begins or a person lands at the airport or arrives at the office or an embargo ends or a march steps off or when that much-anticipated giant inflatable singing flea will be in town. So getting the time right is important. But time and again our timing is off because we’re not describing time accurately.   Often, in the United States, this happens between the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November, when in most of the country it’s Daylight Saving Time (note, “saving” isn’t plural). During this period it’s not, say, 2 p.m. CST but 2 p.m. CDT; that is, Central Daylight Time. Each U.S. time zone name changes to reflect circumstances. EST (Eastern Standard Time) becomes EDT (Eastern Daylight Time), etc. It’s a small but important distinction and not one limited to the United States.   Since 1996 Europe (except Iceland), where Winston Churchill once said that the idea of changing clocks provides “the opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness among the millions of people," has also had a form of this called European Summer Time, which runs from the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October. In the Southern hemisphere – where summer starts in December – Daylight Saving Time more or less occurs from late October through late March.   Springing ahead or falling back, however, is not without controversy. The great Canadian writer Robertson Davies said that time change suggested “the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Yes, you read that right, he was complaining about governments encouraging their people to become “healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Now that's a curmudgeon!) Despite Davies, around 70 countries worldwide adhere to “Daylight” or “Summer” time to do just that.   So while it’s true that in casual correspondence CST is okay when you actually mean CDT, and it’s sort of a moot point when scheduling meetings online since most (probably all) systems correct for time changes in meeting requests, given the opportunity it’s always best to err on the side of accuracy and use the correct acronym. After all, time waits for no man (or, for that matter, woman).

Today's read & other stuff - Gourmet Goes; Saveur Grows

 

More on the goring of Gourmet:

• “Gourmet Magazine, 1941-2009: A recipe for obsolescence,” from the Boston Globe, in which the writer  includes ingredients (“1 cup gorgeous photography ½ cup big-name bylines,” etc.) and instructions, concluding with “Serve as symbol of bygone vision of gourmet life in America - and as sign that even upmarket niches can be too confining.” Ouch.

• “More Than Just A Magazine, Gourmet' Says Goodbye,” from NPR.com,  by a writer who had an article scheduled to appear in the December issue. Too bad, too late – Gourmet’s last issue is November. 

• Saveur’s publisher Merri Lee Kingsly interviewed by Forbes.com after Gourmet announcement. On why Conde Nast chose to shutter Gourmet instead of Bon Appetit: “Bon Appetit is more about putting Hellmann's mayonnaise on Wonder bread, not living the good life.” On how the closing is impacting her: “I've been getting phone calls and résumés from people who are making more money than I am in far junior positions.” Hardly said with sadness: "Without Gourmet, Saveur is the only real travel, culture and foodie magazine left. It was the two of us, now it's only us.” Saveur’s ad revenue, it should be noted, is up 22 percent so it’s obviously doing something right.

Can I suggest we all now just move on. After all, the Barefoot Contessa lives on.

 

Today's read & other stuff - Please, Sir, I Want Some More

Gourmet: R.I.P.

From Ruth Reichl's Twitter account: "Thank you all SO much for this outpouring of support. It means a lot. ... We're all stunned and sad..... Dishes done. All gone. Great gathering at the house tonight. I so love the people I've worked with at Gourmet. Hard to believe it's over."

Slate's take: How Conde Nast Is Like General Motors - The Magazine Empire as Car Wreck

New York Magazine asked a bunch of famousy chefs what they thought about Gourmet's demise. "Gourmet was not the Bible but people read it," noted one of the chefs. "But the world changes. It's big and sad news."

From Time Out New York, a cris de coeur about "where we go from here."

A great slide show about Gourmet at the Daily Beast. I especially like this cover:

Color Coded

We know that, say, Maya Angelou is African American, but is she Black or black?   I’ve come across several documents lately, written by colleagues and others, who’ve referred to African Americans (as well as people of African heritage living in other countries outside Africa) as Black. Ditto, I’ve seen people like me – a member of the Caucasoid race – referred to as White or white.   I get the caution – one person told me she thought lowercasing a color when referring to race may connote disrespect – though I'll admit I also roll my eyes at it. Seriously, people, we’re talking about uppercasing and lowercasing letters. Let’s all stay calm.   With all due respect to people everywhere, the answer is that both black and white, when referring to people’s race, are lowercase. This is AP style as well as that of most mainstream media outlets. “Lowercase black and all racial designations derived from skin color (white, brown, yellow, red),” notes The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage.   While we’re on the subject, I’ve also come across several instances of writers referring to black people en masse as African Americans. Go USA and all that. But keep in mind that people of African ancestry live around the world and that not all black people are African American.