Word Sniper

Don't be so snarky to your kin!

2009-03-02T20:36:00.013-05:00

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?

Helen of Troy, the Oscars and Plato, who knew?

2009-02-23T21:15:00.020-05:00

Whew, it's been awhile. I've been bad. Haven't posted in nine days. School's been hectic, I've been doing work for my client project and also attending events like this past weekend's Podcamp Toronto, so there haven't been too many words being sniped lately. Don't criticize me too much for that, okay Jenessa Fernandes? Inside joke, don't worry about it.

Last night the Leafs played the Rangers. They finally won, in overtime. Attaboy Nik Hagman.

But I bet most of you weren't watching that eh? There was something else on. Something that pulled in way more than 30 million viewers across North America. Something called the Academy Awards. I have to admit, I watched a fair bit of the show. Hugh Jackman's opening monologue wasn't even that bad. There were some low spots...but the high points seemed to outnumber them. The Japanese animator saying, "Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto" was classic. The Milk screenwriter's speech was moving. I also loved anything involving Slumdog Millionaire. That movie really struck a chord with me. The music was great, the child actors brilliant. The fact that it seemed to cross a lot of genres (action, epic, comedy, romance, coming-of-age and gangster come to mind) really resonated with a lot of audiences.

So to go with my theme of trying to snipe words that are in the news, I'm going to elaborate on the very interesting (to me) history of the word ACADEMY.
In modern times, an academy has come to be known as an institution of higher learning, research, or honorary membership, like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But the root of this word has existed in Western civilization for almost 3,000 years. Get this - Akademos was a hero of the Attic Greeks during the Trojan War, according to ancient Greek mythology. Akademos was the guy who let the Trojan invaders and future hero-gods, Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux), know where the Athenians were hiding Helen.

That's just the beginning of the story. Akademos' legendary estate was located just outside of Athens and Plato chose this spot to operate his Academy. It wasn't until the 16th-century AD that the word took on the meaning of a school or meeting place. Academia, referring to those who work as professional academics in universities and colleges, didn't come into the lexicon until the mid-1950s.

There ya go! Your nerd learning for the week. By the way, I took a full two or three Classical Civilization credits in university. I think this might be the first time I've ever used what I learned back then in a constructive manner.

Did you watch the Oscars? What did you think? Was Slumdog deserving of all the accolades? I certainly think it was.

Watch this.

Brand Rant

2009-02-14T17:59:00.005-05:00

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 see the light!

2009-02-08T18:17:00.009-05:00

I'm going to rehash some material I wrote for my Online PR class on Friday. Our topic this week was transparency and honesty in the online world so we talked a lot about corporate ghostblogging and other wickedly unethical (my opinion) stuff.

Turns out there's many of us in class who fall on opposite sides of the fence on this issue Some see nothing wrong with a corporation starting a blog under what I'll call "false pretences." Others, like myself, think it's completely and utterly wrong. I guess that could just be my four years of j-school shining through. NO BIAS NO BIAS NO BIAS Thanks Carleton...

So, if we're reading a corporate blog, how do we know if the writing is really being typed out by those who say they’re doing it? For example, let’s say Prime Minister Stephen Harper has a Twitter account, which he does. Is he the person actually typing out 140-character notes on his BlackBerry? Or is it some nameless PR person? Does it really matter? It may, it may not. I don't know because I'm just a young rookie. But Thornley Fallis VP Michael O'Connor Clarke makes some good points here.

Back in the day when newspapers and huge media conglomerates owned the flow of information, we at least had an idea where the news was coming from. Stories had REAL names attached to them. While obviously major news outlets like the Globe and Mail or Fox News in America have some blatant biases, all it took was a little bit of education and exploration to sift through the garbage to the actual news. If a writer made a mistake or you disagreed with their opinion, you knew exactly who to send a letter of complaint to.

Now we have corporate blogs written by PR folks on behalf of CEOs or for celebrities by their personal assistants.

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.

A fanatical fancy

2009-02-01T11:36:00.012-05:00

For me, this has turned out to be a weekend of sports. On Friday night I played some hockey for only the second time this year. Saturday was Doug Gilmour's big night at the Air Canada Centre and tonight is the Super Bowl, which I don't really give a crap about.
Seeing as how I'm one of the biggest Gilmour fans out there I figured the word "fan" would be a decent choice as today's subject.

For such a small word, fan sure has a strange history. I've always thought the origin was cut and dry - fan is just a short-form of fanatic. It makes sense right? Not so, say some random Internet sources. In case you didn't know, the INTERNET is considered an acceptable and extremely reliable source by many self-professed academics, including myself. Actually, I've never claimed to be an academic, that's just some tomfoolery.

According to Wikipedia, the most trusted name in news, knowledge and all things important, the word fan has some etymological confusion surrounding it. Apparently some guy wrote a dictionary of baseball and cited another man's work tracing fan back to the word "fancy", which described 19th-century followers of English boxing. Sounds dubious to me.

I prefer this explanation, provided by the Online Etymology Dictionary (OED), which just happens to be an awesome website for those of you who are FANS of nerdy things:
First heard in America in 1889, fan is likely a short-form of the word fanatic and referred mostly to baseball enthusiasts. The OED always says fan "may" come from "the fancy" which refers to a
collective group of boxing followers. Still, I don't like that explanation so we'll go with the obvious etymology - fan is just a derivative of the word fanatic, meaning a person marked or motivated by an extreme, unreasoning enthusiasm, as for a cause.

So here are my questions to my hopefully loyal readers, if I even have any at this point. Of course I do, who am I kidding. My Blogger webmaster tools tell me so.
What are you a fan of? Is it a crazy obsession or just a tiny little bit of love? Do you think fandom is reasonable behaviour for an adult? Finally, to tie this all back into public relations - has your fanatical behaviour has been influenced by PR messages and publicity?
(Full disclosure - I started writing this blog for my Online PR class. However I totally intend to keep it going when class finishes in eight weeks.)

-This post was dedicated to my old chum Darcy Knoll, who I saw last night and is now engaged and felt the need mock my choice of blog topic. Must suck being a fan of the Ottawa Senators eh buddy?

Commuting: Thank God I don't do it

2009-01-26T18:20:00.014-05:00

In honour of everyone out there who has to commute to work or school, I'm dedicating this, my fourth all-time Word Sniper post, to the word "commute".
I was watching CityTV news tonight and for some unknown reason they feel the need to update viewers on the GTA's traffic situation every five minutes. Why do they do this? Are people in cars actually watching the news? No, they're listening to the radio. CBC Radio, 680 News, this is your territory. Heck, maybe even 102.1 the Edge. But CityTV? Come on. It's a waste of airtime and takes us away from more important and exciting stuff like watching Michael Kuss do his thing 15 times in one hour.
I also realized - not today but a long time ago - that commuting sucks. I am promising to myself this very minute that I'm going to do my best to never commute more than 30 minutes. Even that's a little long but sometimes it's unavoidable. Right now I'm walking 10 minutes to school every morning and that's just plenty. Sitting in a car for two hours every day just doesn't sound like a lovely way to waste my life.

While commutes may seem like a distinctly modern-day activity, the word itself is actually of Latin origin and didn't enter English until 1633, when it meant "make less severe". The Latin "commutare" actually meant "to change often or altogether". The Latin prefix "com" denotes a more intensive state, while mutare means to change.

"Ohhhh, like the word mutate?" you say. Yes, like the word mutate. Bet you never thought commute and mutate derive from the same source eh? I certainly didn't. In the late 19th-century, a commutation ticket was something like a monthly bus pass and would get you on a train for an entire season.

So how did the word's meaning change? By 1795, commuting money was a common term for getting currency exchanged and also for combining a number of payments into a single transaction. So, suddenly, when people started using commutation tickets and combining their public transit tickets into one season-long pass the word took on its current travel-related meaning.
According to etymonline, commute didn't become a noun until 1960, when highways really started to get jammed up with Chevys, Fords and Cadillacs.
There you have it. Commuting sucks.

Stereotyping: not good

2009-01-23T15:11:00.007-05:00

Sitting here in my online PR class today, something hit me smack in the face. Nah, it wasn’t a fist or a flying Junebug.

It was the realization that in my chosen profession, public relations, using stereotypes is often par for the course. Every day we’re told to “target our audiences” and then tailor our messages to meet the audience’s wants and needs. Isn’t this just another form of stereotyping? Let’s say we want to hit my demographic, the elusive 18 to 45-year-old white, middle-class male. Are we going to try to sell a nice rose wine? Probably not. What about a trip to the local spa? Again, probably not.

But the problem with this is there are many people within that 18-45-year-old white, middle-class male demographic that would probably go for either of those things. When sending messages out to the public, PR and advertising types always aim at the majority, the norm, the average. In most other parts of Canadian society these days, people are being taught to see each person as an individual and not look at groups as a whole. Stereotyping, whether it's based on race, religion, skin colour, sexuality, gender or age, can be a very dangerous thing, as we can see from news stories like this.

So should PR be changing too? Sure, the messages may not be as effective if we don’t stereotype, but they may be more ethical. And to me, that’s what really matters.

Enough ranting. On to etymology. If you didn’t guess already, today’s word is “stereotype”. This word has particularly interesting roots in both Greek (stereo) and French (type). In Greek, stereo means solid, while in French type means…exactly the same thing. So at its most basic roots, stereotype just means “solid type”. Think early printing press here.

According to etymonline.com, stereotype is first heard in 1798 and meant a “method of printing from a solid plate”. By 1850, the meaning had already changed to “image perpetuated without change”. By the early-20^th century the word had arrived at its present-day meaning - a conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.

The key word I see there is oversimplified. If we oversimplify our PR we might just end up missing those key publics we are aiming at.

If that doesn’t make any sense, please debate in the comments section below.

Have a good one folks, I'm out for the weekend...perhaps I'll post again tomorrow. We'll see how I'm feeling.

A nation? You decide

2009-01-21T20:25:00.002-05:00

Nation.
It's a strong word. It brings to mind a cohesive, similar group of people headed towards a common goal.
It was also newly crowned President Barack Obama's word of choice during his historic inaugural address yesterday. According to the Toronto Star, Obama uttered the word "nation" no fewer than 15 times yesterday. Runners-up were "America", with nine occurrences, and "generation" with eight. Scroll down the Star's sweet word cloud page to George W. Bush's first inaugural address. "Nation" once again triumphs as most popular word.
What is it about this word that seems to strike such a chord in the American populace? Is the USA even a nation in the true sense? To answer that, let's take a look back at the history of the word.
I'll go back to what is quickly becoming one of my favourite resources - etymonline.com, lovingly maintained by Douglas Harper. According to the website, "nation" is a descendant of the Latin word nationem (or natus), which literally meant "that which has been born". It's first found in its modern form in Old French, c. 1300. Slowly but surely the word came to mean someone who belongs to a cultural or social community. In recent decades, nation seems to have taken on an entirely new political meaning - akin to state or country. But is this the proper usage?
It's a tough call, and I'm hardly an expert on this subject, having taken just a couple Political Science classes at university. Some define nation as those who belong to a particular race. Others say it could mean any group of people that have something in common. I for one think I belong to Leafs Nation. It was never a choice. I was born that way. I kid, I kid.
Anyways, I guess we could answer my second question positively or negatively. For some, the United States of America will never be a nation. It's a country of incredible diversity, a "patchwork heritage". To hardcore political scientists, a nation-state is defined as something more along the lines of a country like South Korea, with a nearly homogeneous population, or Japan.
But if we decide to define the word as a group of people with a common goal, creed or interest, then the United States (and Canada) could definitely be deemed a nation.
This is part of the beauty of the English language. It's constantly evolving and so adaptable. To quote the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson- "The English language is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven."
In my opinion, if these tributaries carry currents of change, then so be it.
If you want to read more on this subject head here - I'm certainly no expert. Just trying to promote debate.
So what do you think? Is the USA a nation-state or is Obama just using the word as a propaganda/PR tool to "rally the troops?"

First Post Jitters

2009-01-20T16:44:00.007-05:00

What do you like?
When it comes to creating a blog, I've heard, from sources including the CBC Radio show/blog Spark and my Online PR instructor Jessica McLaughlin, that this is the first question you should ask yourself.
Well, I happen to enjoy learning about the etymology of words, among many other hobbies. Not any old words - but strange, weird, archaic and rarely used words. Words like inauguration, prorogue and etymology itself. Sure, most of us have HEARD the word "etymology" but how many actually use it on a day-to-day basis?
Now that I've been outed as a lexophile, I think it's time to discuss where I'm planning to go with this blog. I'm going to be honest, I probably wouldn't have started blogging if it weren't for the aforementioned Ms. McLaughlin.
But here we are. I've been charged with the task of creating a blog dealing somehow with public relations, social media or corporate communications. So why not delve into what is obviously the most important part of communications - words and their meanings?
I've chosen to name this blog "Word Sniper" for a few reasons:

Sniper is an awesome word with an interesting etymology
I'm watching Barack Obama's inauguration parade and snipers are everywhere
I'll be attempting to act as a sort of lexo-sniper, tracking down strange words across the vastness of the Internet and tying them into the history of journalism, literature and PR

So, for today's post, the Sniper's first, I'm going to take a brief look at the origin of the word sniper.

Snipe, in case you didn't know (and I certainly didn't before today), are a strange breed of long-billed marsh birds found all around the world. According to etymonline.com, the word "sniper" is first found as a verb meaning "to shoot from a hidden place" in 1773. Apparently British soldiers in India thought it was quite the feat to be able to shoot an unarmed bird in a swamp. Somehow within a few decades sniper turned into a cover-all term for soldiers, police officers and others with guns who happened to be good at shooting living creatures and beings from hidden places.
Sniper has also been used in recent years as a pejorative term for insurgents and terrorists in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. See that headline in the link - "Insurgent snipers sent after troops". Look how a word, used in the right context, can change meanings completely. "Sniper" started its life describing soldiers with extremely accurate shots and now it has come to sometimes connote sneaky terrorism. Now I'm not defending the actions of insurgent snipers here. It's just an observation on the changing meaning of the word. This kind of thing happens frequently in our society. Stay tuned in the coming days for more enlightening posts. Hope you enjoyed.