Crash Blossoms: true story of how Phillip Blanchard practices censorship and bans people

"The Solomon Scandals" -- a D.C. newspaper novel -- was inspired by a high-rise collapse and U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff's hidden investment in a CIA-occupied building

2010-03-08T22:15:00.003-07:00

DavidDavid Rothman’s novel was 30 years in the making ...

The Washington City Paper has praised “The Solomon Scandals” for “the same dark zeal Hammett held for Frisco or Chandler had for Los Angeles....”

[ In a recent email interview, we asked Rothman about the genesis of “his novel and its storyline. What follows is an edited transcript of our email exchange. ]

DANNY BLOOM: You started writing the novel’s first draft some 30 years ago. What was the original genesis of the story?

DAVID ROTHMAN: A family friend tipped me off that Senator Abraham Ribicoff from Connecticut was too cozy with a major government landlord.

From the start, I saw a possible roman a clef here. After looking through hundreds of federal office leases and interviewing a Ribicoff lawyer, I revealed that the senator’s “blind trust” had secretly held an investment in a CIA-occupied building despite the senator's assurances to the press that he hadn’t put a penny into government-related properties. The law banned Ribicoff, as a senator, from participating in partnerships leasing to the feds. Ribicoff was a hero to me -- I still appreciate his better side on issues such as Vietnam and poverty -- so you can imagine how I felt. No right-wing conspiracies here!

Via States News Service, my freelance story made various Connecticut papers, including the New Haven Register. Jim Polk, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Watergate-related work for the old Washington Star, followed up on the NBC Nightly News on TV and in The New Republic magazine after checking the facts for himself.

Not a word came out, however, in the Washington Post or any of the other Washington dailies. To this day I still don't know what definitely happened. But for the novel, I had a field day cooking up some corruption and international intrigue to explain my imaginary newspaper's shoddy coverage or noncoverage of a U.S. senator's illegal investment and a building collapse. In real life, 14 workers died and dozens were injured at Skyline Plaza in Northern Virginia, but in the end no one received any meaningful punishment.

Skyline, incidentally, shows up by name in the novel. I thought it would be fun to refer to some actual history even though I want to emphasize that neither my book neither the related Web site at http://www.solomonscandals.com/ assigns blame.

BLOOM: Why’d you go with the name, “The Solomon Scandals”?

ROTHMAN: The "Solomon" in the title is a sleazy real estate tycoon who just happens to be a major advertiser of the Washington Telegram and friends with both the editor and publisher. "Scandals" means everything from local zoning bribes and a rickety high-rise to CIA payouts that Seymour Solomon helps launder for a Latin-American dictator.

My guys thoughtfully facilitate the payouts and much of the rest through blackmail from their buddy in the Oval Office. A D.C. “mafia” uses a far-ranging, visionary approach all too often missing from the legitimate side of domestic and foreign policy. A review of Scandals invoked the M word, and I love it, just so people understand this is equal opportunity crime with different ethic groups jointed together in blissful conspiracy against the taxpayers.

Hello, Jack Abramoff? Sy and friends have a few tips for you. Number One: Try harder to get the media on your side.

By the way, I picked “Solomon” because of the mix of power and wisdom it suggested, and I did so decades before “Peter Solomon” showed up in “The Lost Symbol.” Sy Solomon isn’t the very smartest or wisest guy in the book but is Einstein-brilliant at befriending the right people, old-line Wasps included.

‘Scandals’ is a mix of suspense and satire.

BLOOM: There are a bunch of references to obsolescence in the novel. Can you give me some examples?

ROTHMAN: Well, on page 14 at the start of Chapter 3, I describe a bureaucrat past his prime: "Larry Zumweltnar, chief PR man at GSA, was a relic from the Nixon days with a stentorian growl and a fleshy, pouty face—the look of a fat teenaged bully turned bald and dressed in a dark blue suit and tie." A Democrat may be in the White House in “Scandals,” but Nixon-style coverups go on. In fact, maybe Zumweltnar is up to date enough for the President Eddy Bullard’s administration after all.

On page 169, I discuss old newspaper artifacts. A character named Victoria Simpson is publisher of the imaginary Telegram. Stone is about to sneak a story into the paper, with the unwitting help of a friend in the shop, and how’s part of the scene:

“As the elevator doors were shutting in front of me, I took one last look at the lobby. Victoria Simpson had turned it into a museum of sorts for tourists and Scout troops, and now a rickety Linotype towered above the guard desk. She’d borrowed her machine back from the Smithsonian.

“Behind glass were old copy pencils, green visors worn by editors in the Front Page days, and an antique Remington typewriter that had escaped being melted down for scrap during the Depression.

“It all seemed so ancient now, so different from the video display terminals starting to show up elsewhere in the building. I thought of a science-fiction movie where mysterious forces tried to re-create a motel room for an earthman. Were Hildy Johnson to step out of The Front Page and appear alongside the Remington, he’d probably feel as out of place as the earthlings must have."

[Editor’s note: In real life, at the Lorain Journal, 30 miles west of Cleveland, David Rothman himself worked on a Smith Corona and a Remington, both manual typwriters. back in the day.]

On page 240 in afterword, here’s an excerpt on the fate of Jon Stone’s memoirs decades after the scandal.

“Hollywood...would almost surely have passed. No longer was the material so controversial, so beyond accepted belief; rather, the story faced a far-less-surmountable barrier -- no one would have cared.

“Especially with linear, single-medium books on the wane, including the electronic ones, the same would have applied to Uncle Jon’s actual memoirs, even had they been on the market. George McWilliams was winning. The whole truth was just another fart in a windstorm, as Larry Zumweltnar, my uncle’s foe at GSA, would have put it.

“All this changed after the Virginia Historical Society unsealed ‘Scandals’ and sent a copy to Aunt Erica, who, knowing of my interest in previrtual media, promptly mailed it to me. I arranged for the publication of Uncle Jon’s memoirs out of family pride as much as anything else. Up to the last edit, I couldn’t decide whether ‘Scandals’ was a major historical find or just an old family heirloom to be cherished like an ancestor’s gold-plated wedding ring. Would anyone read ‘Scandals’ beyond a few of my fellow academics? And then only in the most halfhearted and dutiful of ways? I simply put the file up on the Institute’s server, VR-mailed a few friends, and held my breath.”

BLOOM: David, you began writing the book on an electric typewriter in the great long-ago, and then you finished it on a computer keyboard. Did you write any of it out on longhand first?

DAVID: I wrote out perhaps a few snippets in longhand when I was on the subway and didn't have a typewriter handy. Nothing beyond that. My handwriting is as bad as Jon Stone's -- abysmal. Talk about tech and literature! Without typewriters, I'd never have been a novelist. Computers and the Internet -- the ultimate reference resource -- only helped. I've come a long way from the time when I sympathized with a group called the Anti-Digit Dialing League or something like that. (There! I just used Google to see if I couldn't track down the right name.)

BLOOM: I hear a movie script for the book is making rounds in Hollywood. Who is looking at it?

DAVID: A veteran Golden Globes judge asked for five copies of my screenplay after I tweaked it to reflect his excellent advice. He loves ''Scandals'' because it is both "outrageous" and "unique" and is inspired by some actual history even if both the script and book are fiction.

Out of consideration for him and people he knows, I can't reveal who most likely will be seeing the script, but they're among Hollywood's biggest names. Plus, he's showing the project to his own backers in a production company.

So, yes, a script based on the novel will be "making the rounds." The script is about 30 years old but, as with book, I've scanned and extensively rewritten it on a Hewlett Packard computer.

BLOOM: Do you have Hollywood agent shopping the book and screenplay around?

DAVID: I decided to go wholesale, so to speak. My logic was that a quirky project like Scandals would be easier to sell to a powerful Hollywood personality -- for example, a clueful director or actor-producer -- than to pitch to agencies and studio committees. This is a merit thing, no special connections. The Golden Globes judge simply ran across an e-book site I owned, we clicked on the phone, and he invited me to think of him for projects of all kinds. D.C. intrigues him. At my end, I wanted to deal with someone whose phone calls would be returned. Sy would approve. Except he'd undoubtedly figure out a way for my guy not to recluse himself should “Scandals” be under consideration for a Golden Globe.

BLOOM: You once told me in an email chat about the future of print and digital platforms that you still think digital is the future for both books and newspapers, "but we'd be damned foolish to throw out the past." Can you expound on this more?

DAVID: I'm a big booster of e-books, but even I don't limit my reading to the digital variety. Just a minority of books are e-books. Last I knew--this may have changed--Saul Bellow’s works are still not digitized. In the newspaper area, I think of readers who are too old or too poor or just too technophobic to go for digital newspapers. What's more, even if so-called snailpapers' (aka print newspaper) get my fingers smudgy, I'm drawn to them at times in the same way I'm drawn to trains in the era of air travel. I haven't been on a jet in more than a decade but have ridden trains. Since when must everything be absolutely up to date?

BLOOM: "Scandals" has a foreword and an afterword written by the someone purporting to be the "director of the Institute for the Study or Previrtual Media". What is this all about? Dish!

DAVID: ''The Institute for the Study of Previrtual Media'' is imaginary--part of my novel's plot, which really doesn't end until the conclusion of the afterword. Jonathan Stone, the newspaperman narrator, is the great-great-uncle of Dr Rebecca Kitiona-Fenton, the institute's director, who writes her foreword in January 2081. The main plot happens in the 20th century. I simply wanted to ponder the ramifications of the scandals a century later, and she was a good way to do it

BLOOM: Who is your target audience for the novel?

ROTHMAN: The book is a satirical suspense thriller for sophisticated readers. My movie audience as I see it is somewhat similar to the ones for “Network” and “Being There.”

BLOOM: What's your elevator pitch?

ROTHMAN: "The only D.C. newspaper movie that ends in the 2080s with a talking Afghan Hound quoting Harry S. Truman at the Cosmos Club. Inspired by two true stories: a U.S. Senator's secret investment in a CIA-occupied building -- and a deadly high-rise collapse."

BLOOM: How many pages is the book? Did you cut much? Who was your editor? What does title mean?

DAVID: “Scandals” runs to around 250 pages. I cut plenty from early drafts while writing the novel; the movie adaptation would have to be a miniseries to get in everything I threw in at one point or another. I showed the book to a whole bunch of people before locking it up, and you could almost include Jim Polk among the editors -- he urged me to let Jon Stone sneak his story into the Telegram. Great advice, and I followed it.

BLOOM: Your book is in print and e-reader editions. Who is publisher for
print, who is publisher for the e-reader edition?

DAVID: Twilight Times Books, a gutsy little house in Tennessee, released both the paper and electronic editions. One of the electronic formats is ePub. I was one of the two main ringleaders of OpenReader.org, whose work prodded the main e-book trade group into doing the ePub standard that Sony, Apple and others are using. As an old Smith Corona guy, I'm a traitor of the first order! Loved your newspaper song, though; and by way of disclosure people need to know I wrote it up on the ‘Scandals’ site.

BLOOM: What are your plans for the book's promotion and PR?

ROTHMAN: A mix of the Net and the possible movie. Small-fry online love the book so far. Alas, book review sections in major newspapers seem more interested in reviewing the latest bestseller from Random House than in making fresh discoveries from smaller publishers like Twilight. One challenge, beyond my novel's irreverence toward the media and its sacred cows, could be that the book mixes genres in a special way. Ironically, that is one of the traits that endeared ''Scandals'' to the Golden Globes guy while horrifying the traditionalists.

BLOOM: Where can people buy “Scandals”?

ROTHMAN: Last I knew, Bridge Street Books in Georgetown carried it — http://www.bridgestreetbooks.com/ .If not, Bridge Street can order it. ‘Scandals’ eventually should show up in other places in the D.C. area, and meanwhile it is also available through online outlets such as Amazon and BN.com. Full ordering info is at http://www.solomonscandals.com/?page_id=36

BLOOM: Thank you for your time today, David.

ROTHMAN: You’re welcome, Danny. Any movie project is a big “if,” but with luck Sy’s crimes will pay off for me.

Crash blossoms -- the true story that Phillip Blanchard refuses to acknowledge to the world or to his readers on Angry Copy Editors

2010-01-30T18:40:00.003-07:00

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/01/i-see-by-snailpapers-that-crash.html

Saturday, January 30, 2010

I see by the snailpapers that "crash blossoms" has made it into Ben Zimmer's "On Language" column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine today. Amazing! The term was co-coined by a group of word mavens just six months ago as a spur of the moment aside. And now this! Will wonder never cease?

By BEN ZIMMER

[January 27, 3010] in [THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE...]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.”

In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include

“Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,”

“MacArthur Flies Back to Front”

and

“Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.”

The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles

“Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim”

and

“Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. UNTIL.....(drum roll)......

Last August, however, one emerged in a TestyCopyEditors.com online discussion forum thread iniated by Mike O'Connell, an American technical editor based in Sapporo, Japan. He had spotted the headline

“Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms”

and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?”

[The article, from the online website Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father tragically died in a 1985 Japan Airlines airplane crash in the mountains outside Tokyo.]

Another regular [and active] poster in the forum, 60-year-old goofball and all around luftmensch Danny Bloom in Taiwan, and also like Mike, far from the madding (and maddening) crowd, very offhandedly and on the spur of the moment, without even thinking about what he was doing, suggested as a response on the thread .......that the last two words of the headline --“crash blossoms” -- ......might be used in a fun way as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings. In literally 3 minutes, Bloom created a mini-blogsite about crash blossoms (http://amafubme.blogspot.com/) and notified the discussion thread that he has done so, giving full credit to Nessie3 (aka Mike O'Connell) as the coiner of the term, news of the neologism quickly spread. Go figure! Who knew?

[NOTE: For his tireless PR efforts and for being there at the birth of a new newsroom term, Bloom -- a 1971 Tufts grad and a student of William Safire's On Language columns for years and years and whose snailmail letter to Mr Safire made it into one of the language maven's language books even! -- was inexplicably banned for life by webmaster Phillip Blanchard at TestyCopyEditors.com without any notice or explanation from the good Mr Blanchard.

http://www.testycopyeditors.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11134

Now back to Ben Zimmer's column.....]

After I mentioned the coinage of “crash blossoms” on the linguistics blog Language Log, having been alerted to it by the veteran Baltimore Sun copyeditor John "Let Them Eat Bacon" McIntyre, new examples came flooding in. Linguists love this sort of thing, because the perils of ambiguity can reveal the limits of our ability to parse sentences correctly. Syntacticians often refer to the garden-path phenomenon, wherein a reader is led down one interpretive route before having to double back to the beginning of the sentence to get on the right track.

One of my favorite crash blossoms is this gem from the Associated Press, first noted by the Yale linguistics professor Stephen Anderson last September:

“McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers.”

If you take “fries” as a verb instead of a noun, you’re left wondering why a fast-food chain is cooking up sacred vessels. Or consider this headline, spotted earlier this month by Rick Rubenstein on the Total Telecom Web site:

“Google Fans Phone Expectations by Scheduling Android Event.”

Here, if you read “fans” as a plural noun, then you might think “phone” is a verb, and you’ve been led down a path where Google devotees are calling in their hopes.

Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact, the hallmarks of the crash blossom. Take this headline, often attributed to The Guardian:

"British Left Waffles on Falklands”.

In the correct reading, “left” is a noun and “waffles” is a verb, but it’s much more entertaining to reverse the two, conjuring the image of breakfast food hastily abandoned in the South Atlantic. Similarly, crossword enthusiasts laughed nervously at a May 2006 headline on AOL News,

“Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts.”

After encountering enough crash blossoms, you start to realize that English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context. If that A.P. headline had read

''McDonald's Fries Are the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers”

there would have been no crash blossom for our enjoyment.

Headline writers have long been counseled to beware of ambiguity. “Ambiguous words often lead to ludicrous and puzzling headline statements,” Grant Milnor Hyde wrote in his 1915 manual, “Newspaper Editing.” “They can be avoided only by great care in the use of words with two meanings and especially words that may be used either as nouns or verbs.”

More recently, in the 2003 book “Strategic Copy Editing,” the University of Oregon journalism professor John Russial offered this rule of thumb: “As the word count drops, the likelihood of ambiguity increases.” He advises copyeditors to think twice about trimming the little words.

The potential for unintended humor in “compressed” English isn’t restricted to headline writing; it goes back to the days of the telegraph. One clever (though possibly apocryphal) example once appeared in the pages of Time magazine: Cary Grant received a telegram from an editor inquiring, “HOW OLD CARY GRANT?” — to which he responded: “OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?” The omitted verb may have saved the sender a nickel, but the snappy comeback was worth far more.

The space limitations of telegrams are echoed now in the terse messages of texting and 140-character-limited Twitter. News headlines, however, are not so constrained these days, since many of them appear in online outlets rather than in print. (And many print headlines are supplanted online by more elastic “e-heads.”) But even when they are unfettered by narrow newspaper columns, headline writers still sweep away those little words as a matter of journalistic style. As long as there is such a thing as headlinese, we can count on crash blossoms continuing to bloom, er blossom.

Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of visualthesaurus.com and a very nice guy, too. The above article from the New York Times was slightly re-edited, without permission or payment, by Danny Bloom, who just wanted to tweak a few things here and there. To see the original article in perfect New York Times snailpaper ink (and in pixelated form online as well) go to the real snailpaper itself or click here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html

A real version of this article appeared in the snailpaper edition of the New York TImes on January 31, 3010, on page 14 of the Sunday Magazine on paper.

posted by dan at 12:58 AM

My Stented Heart -- a country-western tune penned by Biko Lang after his Nov. 6 heart attack and stent operation for his ailing heart

2009-12-28T20:11:00.005-07:00

My Stented Heart -- a country western tune penned by Biko Lang

MP3 audo link is HERE

fmradiomyp3 CLICK HERE

This song is dedicated the the nimble hands, bedside manner and caring heart of Dr Weng, cardiologist par excellence, at St. Martin De Porres Catholic Hospital in Chiayi City, Taiwan (and the wonderful and tender loving care TLC nursing staff of the ICU ward on the third floor).

Performed by J. Gale Kilgore of Big Spring, Texas USA; Recorded in his studio on December 25, 2009

My stented heart
Still keeps good time
My stented heart
She's mine, all mine!

Inside my vest
a treaure chest
And I do feel -- yes!
quite fine and blessed

My stented heart
Still keeps good time
My stented heart
She's mine, all mine!

When time to go
I think I'll knoww
But with stented heart
There's time to grow

My stented heart
Still keeps good time
My stented heart
She's mine, all mine!

O let me grow old
O let life unfold
O stented heart
O happiness untold

My stented heart
Still keeps good time
My stented heart
She's mine, all mine!

A small steel stent
Inside my heart
with this device
I'll never part

My stented heart
Still keeps good time
My stented heart
She's mine, all mine!

A small steel stent
Inside my heart
Will keep me ticking
Till I depart

My stented heart
Still keeps good time
My stented heart
She's mine, all mine!

My stented heart
Still keeps good time
My stented heart
She's mine, all mine!

......
My stented heart
She's mine, all mine!

Phillip Blanchard! Calling Phillip Blanchard! To explain crash blossom's banning!

2009-09-14T23:43:00.001-06:00

Phillip Blanchard! Calling Phillip Blanchard! To explain crash blossom's banning!

2009-09-11T00:20:00.001-06:00

ditto

needles to say (needless to say)

2009-09-01T23:47:00.000-06:00

Can you think of any other expressions that change their meaning with the
absence of just one letter or two?

For example needles to say, which is nonsense talk ...from......needless to say

New words coined: Urban Dictionary ...... eye-mail, night-mail, dream-mail

2009-09-01T23:42:00.000-06:00

Thanks for your definition of night-mail!

Editors reviewed your entry and have decided to publish it on urbandictionary.com.

It should appear on this page in the next few days:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=night-mail

Urban Dictionary

-----

night-mail

(n.) - Email letters and messages that arrive in your inbox overnight while you are sleeping, often from people in different time zones around the world

"Every morning I check my night-mail to see if anything urgent arrived from overseas. With all these time zones worldwide, you never know who is going to email you and when!"

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for your definition of dream-mail!

Editors reviewed your entry and have decided to publish it on urbandictionary.com.

It should appear on this page in the next few days:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dream-mail

Urban Dictionary

-----

dream-mail

(n.) - email letters and messages that appear in your dreams at night while sleeping, only to disappear into thin air upon waking

"Wow, last night I had a dream that I was emailing back and forth with Bill Gates, and he was replying to me, I couldn't believe it. And then I woke up and realized it was all just dream-mail."

===========================================================
Thanks for your definition of eye-mail!

Editors reviewed your entry and have decided to publish it on urbandictionary.com.

It should appear on this page in the next few days:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=eye-mail

Urban Dictionary

-----

eye-mail

(n.) - Visually-pleasing email messages and letters that arrive in your inbox with vibrantly-colored backgrounds and icons.

"Most of my incoming email is boring black-and-white messages, but every once in a while, someone sends me some really cool eye-mail, and I love it!"

"We will of course take best lessons from this.." - BEST LESSONS? WHAAAAAA?

2009-09-01T22:48:00.000-06:00

"we will of course take best lessons from this"

On the Larry King Live show on CNN the other day, a top cop said:

"The parole agent in this case did perform his duties appropriately but we will of course take best lessons from this and see if there's ...

BEST LESSONS? without a THE in front of the phrase, just BEST LESSONS
not THE BEST LESSONS

When did this idiom start appearing?

Garrido Rape Victim Tells Her Story
31 Aug 2009

... "The parole agent in this case did perform his duties appropriately but we will of course take best lessons from this and see if there's ...

www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/56465687.html

An official from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation also appeared on the program. He pointed out the area where Jaycee Dugard and her kids were allegedly held captive was well concealed.

"The parole agent in this case did perform his duties appropriately but we will of course take best lessons from this and see if there's some policy changes that might be necessary," Scott Kernan of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said.

Scott.Kernan@cdcr.ca.gov

EMAIL

Says one blogger:

''More likely, he was just speaking in impromptu manner and got his words a bit garbled, the way that people often do when having to think up and say things quickly. ''

News words that are now old words in tech-speak

2009-08-30T03:51:00.000-06:00

hat tip to Steven Greenhouse, of course, NYTimes, 1998:

Ask -- Used as a noun, preceded by ''the,'' as in, ''What's the ask?'' which basically means, ''What are you asking?'' or, ''What's the question?''

Black hole -- A project requiring infinite amounts of work.

Braindump -- A process by which a departing Microsoft employee or contractor imparts the essential information vital to performing his or her job to the designated replacement. The process normally consumes no more than five minutes immediately prior to the incumbent's departure from the company, nevermore to return.

Bug -- All-purpose term for mistake, error, glitch. Despite its universal acceptance, the term is deliberately avoided by Microsoft technical support personnel when referring to Microsoft software. Employed instead are such euphemisms as ''issue'' or more highly evolved doublespeak terms like ''undocumented feature,'' ''challenge'' or ''design side effect.'' Company loyalists insist, however, that one reason for this circumlocution is that in Microspeak, ''bug'' has the all-inclusive definition of any problem or complaint filed about a product, whether valid or not, as opposed to the general usage, which refers only to actual problems.

Build -- The drive to complete a project or new version of a product. ''The IE 4.0 build is eating up all our dev resources.''

Bump -- Synonym for ''push back,'' i.e., readdress an issue after an unsatisfactory or dilatory response. As in ''You'll need to bump legal again on the permissions issue.''

Buttoned down -- Compliment, meaning tightly reasoned, clear, concise, etc. Not often heard of late.

Buyoff -- Approval from above; green light. ''We need BOOP's buyoff before this project's a go.''

C.L.M. -- Three-Letter Acronym for ''career-limiting move.'' Badmouthing adminispheric dictates, no matter how ill-considered, can be a C.L.M.

Context-switch -- A verb, unbelievably, meaning ''change subjects.'' Example: ''Enough about outsourcing issues. Let's context-switch to planning the rollout.''

Crisp -- Well-reasoned, precisely reasoned. Opposite of random.

Cycles -- Another approximate synonym for ''time,'' as in, ''There aren't enough cycles in the day to drive this issue.'' Often used in tandem with the verb ''burn,'' as in, ''He's really burning a lot of cycles trying to resolve those U.I. issues.''

Death march -- The long, lingering final countdown to a ship date, involving 16- to 25-hour days, catnaps on couches and plenty of ''flat food'' (food, mostly from vending machines, that you can slip under people's doors so they can keep working).

Disambiguate -- A remarkably unclear way to say ''clarify.''

Drive -- To push; to captain the initiative on a particular issue or project. ''Ed is driving the HTML issue for the product.''

E.O.D. -- Endemic T.L.A. (three-letter acronym) meaning ''end of day.'' Example: ''I need your take-away from the off-site by E.O.D. tomorrow.''

Eye candy -- A commonly used term denoting visually attractive material, analogous to ''ear candy'' in the music business.

Facemail -- Technologically backward means of communication, clearly inferior to voice mail or E-mail. Involves actually walking to someone's office and speaking to him or her face to face. Considered highly inefficient and declasse.

Feature -- Euphemism for bug. Dysfunctional attributes in a product are often ''explained'' away by apologists with the phrase, ''It's not a bug, it's a feature.'' As a result, ''it's a feature'' became synonymous with ''it's a bummer.''

Feewall -- A barrier of demarcation for financial responsibility. ''Does this project fall on our side of the feewall?'' translates directly as, ''Do we have to pay for this?''

Fiber media -- Material published on the hopelessly archaic medium of paper. Example: ''Yeah, I used to be a writer in fiber media, but now I'm a content provider in cybermedia.''

Freeze -- Point in a project's times pan after which no more changes can be permitted. Or, as Cityspeak Dictionary puts it, ''Point in product development after which the answer to all great new ideas is no.''

Generating content -- Writing. ''We'll need to hire some content providers to generate content by Milestone 1.''

Global fix -- A programmatic trick to correct all instances of a recurring error. ''Ed's working on a global fix to turn all the commas in the CD-ROM into semicolons.''

Granular -- Generally used in tandem with the verb ''to get,'' as in, ''We need to get granular on this issue,'' meaning to examine the fine details.

Gronk -- The sound of a computer embroiled in bandwidth issues. ''I tried to reboot, but my computer just sat there gronking until I had to call Help Desk.''

Issue -- All-purpose term for practically anything relating to a product, from a particular characteristic or bug to a delicate diplomatic initiative.

Klugey -- (Also kludgey; pronounced CLUE-gee.) Clunky, inefficient, inelegant. ''It's kind of a klugey solution, but we don't have the cycles to clean it up.'' Also used in noun form as kluge or kludge.

Live -- Odd biomorphic usage, sort of an electronic half-life. ''Where will this data live?'' means, ''Where will this data be located?''

Mapping -- Targeting. ''Mapping a user group'' is synonymous with ''targeting an audience.''

Media -- Content that isn't words. Media can include photos, song clips, illustrations.

N.D.A. -- For Nondisclosure Agreement, meaning Keep Your Mouth Shut. A legal document, invoked by Microsoft lawyers for anything more sensitive than setting a lunch date, that allows them to crucify anyone who reveals confidential information.

Net -- Summarize. ''Ed really knows how to net a presentation.'' Related command: Net it out, meaning boil it down.

New paradigm -- Pompous way of essentially saying ''unique'': ''This Web site establishes a new paradigm on the Net.''

Nonlinear -- Becoming nonlinear means becoming irrationally angry. ''When he found out the R.T.M. date was slipping, Ed went totally nonlinear.''

Offline -- A synonym for ''in private'' or ''confidentially''; ''Let's take this offline'' equals ''let's talk about this in private.'' Often used as a semipolite way of saying, ''Shut up about that, you impolitic idiot.''

OOF -- A T.L.A. (three-letter acronym) that has turned into a word of its own. Stands for ''out of office.'' Historians tell us that OOF originally meant ''out of facility.'' Occasionally used, rather irritatingly, in conversation: ''I'm OOF next Friday; you'll have to drive on it.''

Open the kimono -- A marvelous phrase of non-Microsoft origin, probably stemming from the rash of Japanese acquisitions of American enterprises in the 80's, that has been adopted into the Microspeak marketing lexicon. Basically a somewhat sexist synonym for ''open the books,'' it means to reveal the inner workings of a project or company to a prospective new partner.

Orange badge -- Contractor, temp. From the background color of the photo ID badge-card key used for temporary workers.

Own -- To take responsibility for an issue. Ownership is even more serious than drivership; you can drive an issue without owning it, but it's unlikely that you would own it without also driving it.

Ping -- A reminder, or (used as a verb, which is slightly more common) to remind: ''I need to ping my program manager to get some more test help.''

Quality bar -- The remarkably flexible level of acceptability in a product. Tends inexorably to drop as the pressure of an impending milestone or other deadline builds.

Random -- A pejorative term to describe poorly reasoned analysis. Antonym: crisp.

Randomize -- To distract or throw off track by constantly changing course or emphasizing irrelevant details. ''Marketing randomized him by shifting the goalposts every week.''

Reality distortion field -- When a team deludes itself that it can achieve impossibly tight milestones and solve insurmountable tech problems.

Self-toast -- To fatally contradict yourself. Extension of the widespread mainstream usage of ''toast'' as ''history,'' ''dead,'' ''burned out.''

Showstopper -- A function, object or issue important enough to jeopardize a ship date. In other words, a really big bug.

Spec -- Used as both noun and verb: as verb, to analyze a field of information prior to the commencement of a project; as noun, the analysis of that information. Also, a preliminary plan or prospectus. ''Ed will spec the song clips to see which ones we need to swap out''; ''Ed, have you finished the song-clip spec yet?''

Take-away -- Not, as might be suspected, food to go, but impressions gleaned from a meeting or message. ''My take-away from his E-mail was that he wasn't ready to drill down yet.''

Taxonomy of options -- A greatly murkier (and therefore infinitely preferable) way of saying ''range of choices.''

T.L.A. -- Three-letter acronym. A widespread general term in computer-speak, but refined to a way of life (if not a metalanguage) at Microsoft.

Touch skin -- Same basic meaning as facemail or face time. A meeting arranged to counter the austerity of communicating in cyberspace. ''We flew that guy to Redmond just so we could touch skin.''

Truline -- (From screenwriting jargon.) One-sentence summary of a project's projected appeal or purpose.

Uninstalled -- Fired, canned, dismissed.

m-tasking

2009-08-29T23:36:00.001-06:00

m-tasking

(v.) - to do many things at once, such as talk on your cellphone, work on your computer, watch TV, listen to the stereo, etc., also known by its longer form of "multi-tasking"

"With my new iPhone and E-reader, I can be involved with m-tasking all day long, and I love it!"

-- overhead at a watercool in San Francisco , August 32, 3009

by multidannysir707 on Aug 29, 2009
tags: computers, words, japan, toko, kimono, marketing

"open kimono" (Jason Perlow) - open kimono strategy

2009-08-29T23:15:00.000-06:00

open kimono

definition: WHO COINED THIS TERM? WHERE? and WHEN? What DATE?

(adj.) - A business marketing plan that allows consumers to know what's behind the entire operation, with no secrets kept inside the proverbial kimono
"The new e-reader runs on an open kimono strategy, and sales are going through the roof."

-- overheard at a watercooler at Tokyo computer firm

tags: computers, words, japan, toko, kimono, marketing, Jason Perlow

SONY goes "Open Kimono" with sexy new e-Readers

ZDNet - Jason Perlow - ‎Aug 25, 2009‎

''My gut instinct on the new “Open Kimono” strategy SONY is embracing says yes.''

NOTE:

One of my favorite Dilbert cartoon strips features Dogbert as a consultant who is explaining things to the pointy haired manager.

[ILLUSTRATION]

"Incentivize the resources to grow their bandwidth to your end-state vision. Don't open the kimono until you ping the change agent for a brain dump and drill down to your core competencies."

The manager is later found dead in his chair and the medical examiner pronounces the cause of death.

"Confused look. Huge invoice. This man is a victim of consult and blabbery."

UPDATE: Says a reporter very much connected to this item:

"If memory serves me right, I was in Redmond back in 1998 doing a story on workers, especially temps at Microsoft, and someone there I believe gave me an interesing glossary of terms used at Microsoft. And if memory serves me right again, when I wrote this story, I also relied on a parallel glossary that another reporter had, and I took terms from both glossaries. As I wrote in my article, the open kimono term evidently originated outside Microsoft but I have no knowledge where."

Avauntcular, the feminine form of "avuncular" . . .

2009-08-27T08:16:00.000-06:00

Avauntcular

(adj.) Once a woman reaches middle age and her formerly remarkable and
youthful good looks have completely lost their edge, she develops an
air of such utter harmlessness that she is no longer attractive to
men. A woman is described as "avuncular" when she stops looking like a
sexual entity and starts looking like her Aunt Betty.

"At my age, with my looks going into their middle-aged stretch, my
nieces and nephews now look at me with wonder and refer to me as their
'avauntcular' auntie. I love it!"

-- Overheard when two middle-aged women were chatting near a
watercooler at their office on Madison Avenue in New York

coined on Aug 27, 2009

Morgan's Musings also notes a few years ago (2003): "Mom was uptight at the day's start, but by the time we passed through LaPlata, she was in an avuncular (or should I say "avauntcular") mood...."

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