Halloween: Scary Language

On this most terrifying night of the year (excluding the X Factor final), we're taking a look at scariness with some of our favourite scary words.

Spooky, eerie, ooze, creepy and ghoul all have double vowels. We're not sure whether or not doubling up on your vowels automatically makes things scary, but there's certainly a good number of words to support the idea.

All pumpkins are like this before they put on the fake tan.

What about costumes? Some of our favourites have some pretty interesting linguistic roots:

Ghost

Ghost originally meant spirit of man. As in his (or her, in order to be politically correct, which we always are!) life-force, being, etc. It has taken on other meanings nowadays.

The use of spook to refer to a ghost comes from Dutch usage in the United States, and the word wraith is of Scottish origins. French gave us phantom from the Greek phantasma, and poltergeist is actually just a "noisy ghost" in German.

Zombie

The terrifying walking dead came about from Haitian religious beliefs and voodoo. Nowadays zombies are quite trendy and a cult phenomenon. People take part in zombie walks and enjoy literature based on the ever impending zombie apocalypse.

Vampire

We're talking about real vampires, not the camp ones that sparkle. We remember when vampires used to suck blood and not just plain suck. The word vampire came about from French via German. As you may already know, vampires come from Transylvania. The word vampire, however, is more likely from Slavic languages, in particular Serbian. Although most Slavic languages have similar terminology for our blood-sucking sunlight-fearing emo-enthralling creatures of the night, the word can also be found in languages as far away as Polish, Ukranian and Belarusian.

Mummy

The original Egyptian monster. The word itself comes from, you guessed it, Arabic! The word was mūmiya (موميا) and literally meant "embalmed corpse". It found its way into Latin as mumia and eventually transformed into mummy and led to many terrible puns within in British culture (mummy being the equivalent of mommy for those unaware).

So what if we made a "mummy" pun!
Don't tut!

Frankenstein's Monster

Often incorrectly referred to as Frankenstein (who was in fact the doctor, not the monster), Frankenstein's Monster actually had no name, only a series of labels. For clarity we'll refer to him as Frankie.

It's a nightmare picking the right pair.

Since there can't really be an etymology for Frankie, we'll explain something else. One of Frankie's less-affectionate nicknames was "the wretch". Wretch originally referred to someone in exile, or famous warriors or heroes. The meaning was warped beyond recognition in English to eventually mean a despicable or contemptible person. Poor Frankie.

Happy Halloween!

Politics Week: Debates

They say it takes a cunning linguist to mass-debate... so how did the candidates do in the American presidential debates? They've been battles of tongues rather than swords. OK, enough innuendos.

This is what they're fighting for. Not this tattered old flag.
Just to be in charge of every building that flies this flag.

Round 1:

The candidates, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and the incumbent President Barack Obama, squared off for the first time on October 3rd. Policies aside, it was considered a pretty horrible battering for the President. Romney knew his way around a question and was clear in his answers. The President was noted for his inability to speak clearly and answer questions on the spot... which surprised many, as he is generally known for being a skilled orator. Even worse, he spent most of the night staring at his podium instead of looking into the camera. We all know how non-verbal communication can be just as important as verbal communication...

Round 2:

The second debate fell on October 16th, and was done in the "town hall" style. Instead of the moderator asking the questions, they were posed by local undecided voters. The stakes were raised, and while Romney could probably rest a bit on his laurels having done so well in the previous debate, Obama was back and swinging at the GOP's hopeful for the title. However, the whole thing turned into a spectacle more akin to WWE than what one would expect from two people expecting to run the world's most powerful country for the next few years.

Round 3:

The final debate on October 22nd started with Mitt Romney speaking a mile a minute, barely pausing for breath. He seemed anxious to get every word possible out of his mouth... perhaps he felt as if this was his last chance to convince American voters that he was the right choice? Obama spoke calmly and with purpose, and clearly learned from his mistakes in the first debate... no more staring down and ignoring the questions. They did have several verbal sparring matches, talking over each other until nobody could understand a word either of them uttered.

Have the debates changed the outcome? An estimated 4 million early voters had already made their decision by the end of the third debate. Has the election already been decided?

What's In A Font?

More often than not, such as now, you read text rendered by a computer. The ways in which this text is rendered and styled are known as fonts. A font is a character set consisting of a single typeface.

There are two types of fonts: serifs and sans serifs. What are serifs? They're the little tails on letters that are supposed to make them easier to read. Times New Roman, anyone? Arial, on the other hand, is a sans serif font as the letters do not feature any of these strokes.

We're not talking about golf strokes!

There are proportional and monospaced fonts too. In monospaced fonts each character occupies an identical-sized space, whereas proportional fonts give each character a space relative to its size. Typewriters required monospaced fonts, but nowadays most people use computers that often employ proportional fonts, which people usually find to be easier on the eyes.

For those of you who are unaware, this terrifying machine is
a typewriter. People used them to type back in the old days...

Is it that important which font you use as long as it can be read? Yes! For example, don't write your CV (or résumé) in Comic Sans! It makes it look like a joke... albeit not a funny one. Fonts blend linguistics and design together, using written language as an art form.

Fonts can be important...so important that certain companies copyright and trademark them. They can even become synonymous with a brand. When Sony launched the PS3, it came under some criticism for its use of the "Spider-Man" font. Instead of creating a new font, it decided to simply use the font that its film division had created for the Spider-Man movies since it already had the legal rights to it. Apparently, they were afraid of getting into legal battles if their potential new font was too similar to someone else's!

As you can see, there's much more to fonts than meets the eye!

Language In Business: Sounds Foreign?

Cultural identity is closely tied to language... so closely that marketers have long exploited this idea for personal gain. Pesky marketers!

Not everything you buy is from where you think is! We'll start with perhaps the most famous example of foreign branding: Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Sounds German, right? Or Scandanavian? You're miles off! The famous ice-cream brand was actually founded by Jewish-Polish immigrants in the US. Clearly Polish, Hebrew or just plain English didn't sound delicious enough! Danish doesn't have an umlaut or a "zs", though the name was an homage to Denmark's fantastic treatment of Jews during the Second World War, when thousands of Jews were helped to evade capture by the Nazis. The labels on the ice cream initially had a map of Denmark on them too.

Another example is women's athletic shoe brand Rykä. It looks Scandinavian too, but is actually an American brand! Perhaps they were trying to make the brand sound a bit more exotic... or simply thought that American women would prefer Scandinavinan-sounding shoes.

Imagine running in these Scandinavian shoes!

The Dolmio brand, currently running adverts that say "When'sa your Dolmio day?" is actually part of Masterfoods, from Australia. Most people probably wouldn't buy pasta sauce with the tagline "G'day! When's your Dolmio day, mate?". Italians are world-renowned experts in all things pasta-related, so it's natural that they chose an Italian-sounding name.

If anyone has been to Britain and seen a chav, then they probably know what a Berghaus is. For those who haven't, it's a mountaineering coat worn by poorly-behaved cretins, and occasionally, people climbing mountains. The brand is actually from the UK and was originally called LD Mountain Centre. They tried to translate "mountain" and "centre" into German and got "Berghaus".

For those of you who don't know what a chav is,
here's a decent example of how one dresses.

Finally, we have the Pret a Manger sandwich chain. Despite its French name, it is a British company. Someone thought it would be clever to use the French term prêt à porter (ready-to-wear) and substitute manger (to eat) for porter... thus perfectly describing their "ready to eat" food, while filling your mind with thoughts of elegant French cuisine.

Marketers are experts at manipulating language to make people succumb to the lure of exotic foreign branding. There's a reason most frozen pizza brands sound Italian... it makes you think of delicious homemade Italian pizza, when in reality their product tastes like cardboard. You know their tricks now, so don't be fooled!

The Worst Translations In Business

Yesterday we talked about copywriters, and today we're looking at selling your products abroad with some of our favourite examples of translation.

Does anyone remember the cleaning product Jif? If you don't, thank god you have your youth. Everyone else probably remembers it as the old name of Cif. A team of highly-skilled marketers had a few too many coffees and decided that Spaniards, amongst others, were not to fond of trying to say the word. However, listeners were happy to no longer be covered in spit.

The once-famous Marathon bar (at least in the UK and Ireland) was renamed Snickers because the word was more globally recognisable. You can't always just rename your products to be international, so sometimes individual names are required for languages or regions.

Snickers or Marathon... who cares? It's delicious!

You have to consider regional differences. Coca-Cola famously introduced an advert into an Arabic-speaking region with no text, just icons of a sad face, some Coca-Cola, and then a happy face. Obviously, the intended message was that "Coca-Cola makes you happy". However, they didn't think about the fact that Arabic reads right to left, which left the ad being read as happy face, Coca-Cola, and sad face. The ad was a resounding failure.

Colloquialisms are fantastic stumbling blocks for marketers as well. "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux" wasn't the best tagline for the Swedish vacuum manufacturer to place in advertisements in the United States. General Motors' Nova never did well in Latin America either, due to sounding like "no va", as in "doesn't go" in Spanish.

Toyota failed with their MR2 in France since the name in French sounds similar to "merde", meaning shit. The car did poorly, but Toyota are probably more concerned about recalls at the moment.

In the 1960s, "Come alive with the Pepsi generation" was wrongly translated as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave" for Chinese adverts. This was much to the delight of Coca-Cola... until they managed to name their product "Bite the wax tadpole" and "female horse stuffed with wax". They eventually worked on it and came up with "happiness in the mouth" after researching thousands of Chinese characters.

Is Pepsi okay? Uhm... maybe not.

With globalisation these errors are becoming less and less common as businesses become more aware of cultural differences. Nevertheless, sites like Engrish.com are a fine example that not everyone is paying for the professional assistant they require... and if they are, they're being ripped off!

If you're dining in a restaurant in Lisbon, Portugal, please try the "sawdust" as we'd love to know what it is! We didn't have the cojones to try it last time!

Before anyone complains, we know that some of these examples aren't necessarily true, but we bet you enjoyed them anyway! Many of them feature frequently in marketing textbooks so they're clearly of educational merit... we suppose.

Language In Business: Copywriting

Businessmen love money... who doesn't? It may be true that it doesn't bring happiness but we're always happier on payday than when we're counting our pennies at the supermarket.

This is what your time and effort is worth.

How do you get money? You could work. Work is quite simply doing something you don't want to do and being paid for it by someone so they don't have to do it themselves.

Maybe you had a killer idea and you created something that people will want. That's fantastic, but how do you get people to buy it?

You have to convince them. You're definitely not the first person to make something people want and probably not the first person to make the product you're hoping to sell. Perhaps you have one tool at your disposal that others have ignored: language. There's good money for those who can use their language (or languages) well, be it in the form of copywriting, translation or interpreting.

How important is good copy? A lot of small businesses will overlook a professional writer in order to save money... who could blame them, given the economy is thriving like worms in an aviary? The issue is that not everyone writes the same way, with the same message. A person who writes for their own business may leave out key information that their customers want to hear.

Who's going to write your copy... you? Dream on!

Many readers are put off and confused by pretentious language, complicated sentence structure and long-winded messages. Short and simple, right? The language needs to be prioritised to make sure the main selling points are clear and concise.

Then there's register (we talked about this a while ago, read the original post here). Are you communicating with your customers? Is the register appropriate to what you're selling? Would the Ritz have "Yo dude! Come to our totally awesome hotel!" on their brochure? Would a cheap and cheerful hostel need to read like Chaucer?

The words have to be picked carefully. Not every word has the same meaning for readers, just like awesome in the previous example. We doubt most people would think of the original meaning of the word rather than its contemporary usage.

Why is it "I'm lovin' it" and not "I'm enjoying it"? Think about the strength of the words and the message the company wants to convey. Whether it's crap meat or not, you'll likely be more inclined to buy a Big Mac rather than a Larger-Than-Usual Mac.
 

Get It Right: Then And Than

If only we lived in a perfect world where people knew the difference between the letter a and the letter e (excluding Geordies who pronounce them the same)... the difference between these words is only one letter! How do people still get it wrong?

Then

Use it if something happened followed by something else. It indicates a continuation. "I learned how to speak properly, then people didn't think I was a moron."

It also is used to refer to a specific moment in time. "My stupidity was blatant then."

Sideburns were cool then.

Than

It's used for comparing or contrasting. "Now that I have learned how to speak properly, I feel smarter than before. People who use correct grammar are smarter than those who don't."

Think of it this way: You were using the words incorrectly, then you learned the correct way to use them and you felt better than before.

Mercury is smaller than Earth.

Sequential? Then. Comparative? Than.