Word Sniper

Oh wow! He's got a new blog template! Yes. I do. It looks way better.
I also have a new problem - all my posts have different fonts. This is due to my obsession with picking the font every time. From now on, I'm going with the default Blogger font because right now my older posts look like madness.

Today I'm going to try something new. I'm going to attack TWO words at one time.
"How can he do that?" you ask. Easily. It doesn't take that long at all really.
I have to send a so-called "shoutout" to my Dad and Danielle Simpson for giving me the ideas for these two words - kin and snarky.

Kinship came up in a phone conversation with my Dad and snarky, well Danielle, one of my classmates at Centennial, wanted to know its origin.

I'm surprised by the fact that kinship is actually a relatively new word and wasn't heard until the mid-1830s, according to etymonline.com. However, the word kin stretches wayyyyy further back into history. In Old English, kin was spelled cynn and meant roughly the same thing as it does today - to be family or related by blood or marriage. Dutch and German have remarkably similar words - kunne and kind. Kin is ultimately a word that comes to us from Latin, Greek and possibly even earlier. The Latin word genus, which is now one of the classifications of biological organisms, originally meant birth or race.
Now, my thoughts on kinship - we're all kin. Aww, isn't that nice?

On to "snarky", which is a word I frequently use to describe myself at any time earlier than 10 a.m.
Okay, after doing some research, I can tell you this one is short and sweet. Meaning irritable or short-tempered, snarky first appears as an adjective in 1906. Snark, a verb meaning "to snort", entered English about 40 years earlier, and is remarkably similar to the Low German word "snarken". Apparently this is one of those rare words that appeared as the result of the word imitating a non-verbal sound, like buzz or hiss. The best writing I found while rooting around the net for the origin of this weird word is this excerpt from London's The Guardian newspaper:

"And few groups of words are as useful for verbal snipers, those who sneer, snap and snarl, who resort to the snide, sniffy, snarky, snooty and snotty, as those which begin with an s and an n. That is not to say that all belong exclusively to the world of vituperation. Snug and snuggle are cosy agreeable concepts."

I love sn-words. Seeing as how I'm a verbal sniper. Ohhhh, so lame.

Can you think of any other nasty or nice words beginning with the letters s and n? Or, if you can't think of new words without looking in the dictionary, why don't you tell me, and everyone else reading my blog, the most snarky thing you've ever done?

So you want me to brand myself?

Okay, I can get the personalized branding, but this online branding junk is just way too fake. It’s not too hard to keep up appearances when all you have to do is communicate with your past, present and future peers via text and image-based media.

I could come across as the most polite, knowledgeable person online but who knows, maybe you’ll meet me next week and discover I haven’t shaved in a month, I’m not a fan of showering and I live with 39 cockroaches in the basement of my parents’ house in downtown Scarborough.

What really matters here? I use Twitter almost every day. Quite effectively I think. However, the brand I’m putting out there is not as fake as some of these Twitterati who use the social network as a purely fashionable networking or marketing tool. These are the people who only use Twitter for business, to sell things or talk about their latest accomplishments.

For some reason, these people also seem to get the most followers. Those of us who tweet or blog about things that we actually enjoy – for me these include things like hockey, photography and the never-ending news cycle – are told it’s not appropriate for an online brand. But we’re the ones building a network of like-minded people with similar interests who actually care what we have to say.

Sorry for the negative, cynical and potentially offensive vibe of this post, but I’ve had a long week dealing with the flu followed by my first day of physical labour in some time, which in hindsight I probably should have avoided. Anyways, the gist of what I’m saying is I wish people would just be themselves. Online and offline. Those of you who know me personally know I have one defining personality trait – I WILL tell you what I think (to a point obviously). Sure, that often results in me complaining more than the average person, but someone has to do it. If you portray yourself online as a perpetually positive person with only good things happening in your world, don’t worry, you will get found out eventually. If you brand yourself as a social media expert and then get pulled into an interview and don’t know a damn thing, you would’ve been better off not branding yourself as an SM expert at all.

To me, it’s once again all about transparency, except this time it’s about personal honesty and integrity, instead of an organizational type. If we expect companies like Wal-Mart and Goodyear to have authentic online identities then we should hold that same high level of accountability on ourselves.

Lecture over. Now it’s time to SNIPE THAT WORD!

The word brand comes from Old English, that beautiful language of Geoffrey Chaucer and Richard the Lionheart, but not of William Wallace. He probably spoke Scots or something. Originating in the proto-Germanic tongue as “brandaz”, the word originally meant a piece of burning wood. By 1552, to brand meant to make an identifying mark by a hot iron. By the mid-19^th century, brand had come to mean several things, including a particular make of goods. Now I’m being told it means how my personal attributes and characteristics come off to others. Cool.

I take a few issues with this. First, the media need to have the trust of their readers or viewers. Blogs, Twitter, whatever, are all just forms of new media with which to spread information. If we as media consumers don’t know for sure the source of our information, we’re not going to trust it. Second, it’s just plain wrong to be lying to the public. Pretending to be someone else online is lying. Lying is wrong. Therefore, ghostwriting and not being transparent is wrong. It seems pretty obvious to me.

Now some would say it’s all in the name of business. Executives just don't have time to do their own blogging so they have to outsource to a professional blogger. If you don't have time to do your own blogging, don't do it. This is all part of what’s wrong with the world right now - too much business, too little ethics. Why can’t we try to make things better instead of always stooping to the lowest common denominator?

So, next time your boss, teacher, friend or family member asks you to be someone else online, say no. You’ll be doing everyone a world of good.

What do you think? Is ghost blogging kosher? Is it really all that different from everything else PR flacks do like writing speeches for Barack Obama and creating quotes for a news release?

Oh hey, I almost forgot the point of MY blog (I didn't really forget). Or is it my blog? Is my wife writing this? How do you know? You don't, just trust me.

Today's word is "TRANSPARENT." According to those in the know, this word has a Latin origin and was first found in English around 1413 in the form of "transparentum." In Latin "trans" means through and "parere" means to come into sight or appear. By 1592 the word was already meaning something close to its present-day meaning of easily seen through. When referring to an organization transparency means open and public, having the property that theories and practices are easily visible. But wait, you say. Why do we call those pieces of plastic that we use for overheads transparencies? Nope, you probably didn't ask that. I don't think I have to tell you. If I do...well then, you might have a problem.

Finally, you have to see my favourite clip of the week.