Yes, Indeed. I'm Walking.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is more than just me. GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is also the books I read and the thinking, the information, the ideas and the inspiration I get from them.

The single TV in my small assemblage of sticks and bricks on the Gingham Coast has more and more fallen out of use. I rarely watch anything--since anything I watch seems increasingly insulting or barbarous or just plain dumb. 

Though many people tell me about this series or that, and though the men I meet with in the evenings so our dogs can play tell me about slow horses and fast women, I've never watched a single minute of Netflix, or Hulu, or Paramount, or Apple TV. It's all too much work for me and I have too little time.

I find the world of reading much richer.  

(BTW, when I bring up what's been called "the greatest narrative film ever made, Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz," I get nothing but blank looks back. I'll watch what I like. You do the same. And please don't judge me.)

I've always been a reader, but Owen, my wise therapist of almost half-a-century has pushed me deeper into the literary abyss. He started calling my nightly two hours of reading "My restorative niche." I like that, and I hold both the place and the practice as sacrosanct. That is, I scarcely ever miss an evening.

To friends, I call my reading "spending an hour or two with a genius." And even when I read books that are over my head--about one-book-in-three baffles me, I gain value from the very act of reading. 

The other day while on vacation, I stumbled on a neat little bit of Latin, "Solvitur Ambulando." It means, simply, "it is solved by walking," and the fifty or so miles a week I walk along the Connecticut coast, either with Sparks, my one-year-old golden retriever, or solo, help me immensely.

Over the past week, I've gotten a dozen inscrutable emails from a new client. They remind me a bit of notes smuggled out of solitary confinement, written in a minuscule hand on the tiniest scraps of paper. 

To be blunt, I can barely make sense of what my client is trying to say other than, "I need you, George."

I think a lot of people in advertising spend their entire careers not feeling needed by clients. It's a pretty potent feeling when it happens. And it's a lot of pressure.

Remember when agencies were needed? When they were vital to success--which was their purpose, not what it's been replaced by, "always-on content."

My account director, H, was cavalier about these notes. "You'll figure them out, G," she blithed. "You always do."

But, as I also always do, I had my doubts. 

So I threw on an old pair of sneakers, left Sparks sleeping on an expensive sofa, and went out for my second seaside walk of the morning. 

Within the first hundred yards, I started thinking about the old "Supply and Demand" graphs I studied in Econ 101 in that great old textbook I learnt from in the early 1970s. What if, I asked myself, I told their story how Stephen Rattner, the thief and founder of the Quadrangle Group, tells stories in "The New York Times"? What if I told my client's story--their purpose, their solution, their value, not in prose, but in charts?

--

I wondered as I wandered, and before another hundred yards went by, I had drawn in my head two more charts. By the end of half a mile I had an idea, a title, a headline, and five more charts.

When I got home after my 2.2 miles I went right to my office which is girded with books. I found the economics textbook I was looking for. Written by Princetonians Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. 

 

Then I sat down in my second favorite seat and typed out my headlines and the twelve charts I derived while I was out walking.

 

When I was finished, before the pixels were even dry, I sent my document to H. Among H's many talents is her machete-cutdowns of bullshit and ability to take a blowtorch to confusion. Within minutes, H sent me this:

Sometimes the most-important help you can get from a work colleague is a small affirmation that you're not off your rocker. That an idea--even a wisp of one--is worth pursuing, even if it's a little strange.

I suppose there's a lot in this post for a Friday post where I usually try to layoff the deep-dish stuff because I'm tired and my readers are, too. But this all really happened. Just now. Just as I wrote it here.

And that's that.

 

Besides, I'm too tired to go out for another walk.

 

 

Math. Not New.

Years ago I was the co-head of a mediocre independent agency that had a financially-savvy CEO. He was there to gin things up in preparation of selling the agency to one of (it didn't matter which one) the giant advertising holding companies. When I worked there, the place was valued at one-billion dollars. The CEO was hoping to get it to five-billion bucks so he and the other shareholders would be so rich they never again had to pay taxes.

Around that time, or a few moons later, the world was wholesale switching from Blackberries to iPhones. Talk of a game called Angry Birds was dominating my social feeds. There would be ten, twenty, fifty LinkedIn posts a day, "Lessons You Can Learn About Customer Relationship Management from Angry Birds." Or "What Angry Birds (and my teenager) Taught Me About Business Continuity." Hollywood, never one to miss an intelligence-insulting trend made an Angry Birds movie. 

One day, if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, I read two different articles in whatever paper I was reading. 

Rovio, the parent company behind Angry Birds, one article said, had a market cap of $70 billion. (Again, if my memory is right.) While the New York Times, another article said, had a market cap of just $2 billion.

Even if my Rovio numbers are off by a magnitude of 10 and Rovio peaked at a $7B cap, I wondered. How can Angry Birds be worth between 350% and 3,500% of what's arguably the world's most-important newspaper, a paper read by millions of political and business leaders and high net worth people?

It seems to me two things are coming into play here, neither of them good. 

One: We're confusing momentary attention and intrinsic value. One is like a smack across the cheek. The other is a deep, long-lasting effect. One is a bruise. They other is trauma. 

Many in the ad industry are doing the same. They're creating some sensation (usually propagated via unpaid channels) of brief notoriety. While neglecting the more valuable, and more difficult long, tedious slog of brand-building.

The latest Burger King bushwa is a great example of this. As far as I know, their same store sales have been down year over year decade after decade. They've burnt through agencies like trump burns through cranial merkins. For many people, the brand has fallen into complete irrelevance and it's dropped off people's consideration list. 

Pay no attention to that.

Look! A new mother eating a burger. 

Two: As a culture and an industry, we've become card-carrying believers--adherents, even--of the Greater Fool Theory. As long as someone will buy something, it's worth selling it, no matter the long-term effects of the something you're offering. In so many ways, the Greater Fool Theory is peak "something for nothing-ism." Peak short-term thinking.

Ginning up a company's share price to profit from a sale or doing fake ads and getting a gullible company to buy them for the buzz they'll get are two faces of the same coin.

Neither helps bolster or create enduring value.

They're both packaging. 

Wrapping shit in gold leaf and hoping you're out of town by the time the buyer is hit with the stench.

More and more of what I see in our industry is like a politician's promise of a tax break. It might win some votes. 

While bankrupting all of us.

Tactile.

My wife, Laura, and I just returned from five days at the most extraordinary and expensive place I've ever stayed, Castle Hot Springs in the Bradshaw Mountains about two hours north of Phoenix.

Like Rick Blaine in "Casablanca," I came for the waters--five hot springs that lowered in temperature as you descended the mountain to the spring-fed swimming pool. The uppermost was 106-degrees and the pool was about 85-degrees.

I'd say 40-percent of the guests came for the springs. Another 20-percent came to hike. And the remaining 40-percent came for the food.

The food.

The food was the best I have ever eaten in my life by far.

Hold on, I'm rounding into a point here.

While I was on vacation, I became detached from my electronic devices. The resort itself, by design, had only spotty cell coverage and you could really only get wireless in either the lobby or your room. In fact, the resort's wifi password was DoYouReallyWant2?

Just now I read a Wall Street Journal review of "The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World" by Christine Rosen. Here's the sentence that started me thinking: "new things drive out old things, sometimes so quickly that no one pauses to ask whether it was a good trade." Rosen, the review tells us, "implores readers to 'consider what we are losing, as well as gaining, when we allow new technologies into our lives.'"

And maybe this is the key part. Some things we, as creative human beings, need to spend time thinking about, not googling about:

Daydreaming, of course, can’t happen if a person picks up her smartphone for a micro-burst of entertainment the moment she has to wait in line at the supermarket; nor, buried in her screen, will she shoot the breeze with other customers or the cashier. Evidence marshaled by Ms. Rosen suggests that a person who doesn’t daydream is a person less inclined to introspection and invention.

When a person trades momentary boredom for a shot of screen-based dopamine, she gets the pleasure of escape but misses out on being awake and present in the moment and perhaps forgoes an insight or a recollection that would have added something to her life. A person who avoids interacting with others fends off potentially awkward exchanges but may also gradually lose the skills to recognize social cues. There is an opportunity cost to picking up your phone.

As a creative who 99.7-percent of the time presents to clients on Zoom, this passage stung:

"Being human has traditionally involved being a kinetic, tactile mortal who has evolved to read the faces and gestures of other mortals and to perform complex physical actions." 

Reading faces always served as a guide when presenting. It always gave me information. I think it made my work better. Likewise, visiting a client's office, seeing their factory always did the same. In person you learn things you don't learn via screens and garbled phone calls.

I think it's premature to say reading faces is gone. Or that we haven't found ways to overcome the lack of human contact that afflicts so much of our lives. But I think we need to think about the digital immateriality of so much of our living.

One more thing, at dinner each night at Castle Hot Springs, the maitre d' would hand us our menus and say something like, "Your menus for our five-course dining experience..."

 
As much as I value human connection, that phrase made me want to slug him.

Swing and a Miss.

When I was just fourteen and playing varsity baseball for a purportedly elite private high school situated on a triangle between two interstate highways and a crappy mall built on marshland, there was a player on the team--he was a junior when I was a freshman--called Joe Tartaglia.

Though I scarcely talked to him when we were team-mates and though I can safely say I never ever had a substantive conversation with Joe, I think about him with some frequency.

Joe Tartaglia had the single best baseball swing I have ever in my life seen. That includes looking at vintage footage on YouTube of Ted Williams or Stan Musial or Frank Robinson. Whenever one of our coaches needed to demonstrate exemplary batting form, they'd blow their meathead whistles and scream at the assembled, "Takalookat Joe. Joe, swing atta couple."

What made Joe a better metaphor than a ball player is that I can't honestly think of one time I remember him actually making contact with the ball. He had a perfect swing but he always missed the mark.

It's been said by many of the world's legion of horsehide cognoscenti that hitting a round ball with a round bat is the hardest task in sport. And Joe seemed to prove that.

Sunday night I flew in from Phoenix to Boston on an American Airlines flight that was due to land at midnight and instead landed at one a.m. Though my wife and I flew business class, the service on-board was as brusque and surly, as we've come to expect. 

That experience brought to mind Joe Tartaglia.

Just as there is a huge gap between having a beautiful swing and having the ability to drive a ball with regularity, the world's practitioners of advertising seem to have forgotten that there is a vast difference between "branding" and a brand.

My American Airlines plane was well-branded. The flight attendants' uniforms were well-branded. The inflight materials, the canned "safety" announcements and canned inducements to sign up for American Airlines Sky Miles all we're well-designed and up-to-guidelines. If the brand police were aboard, the flying aluminum cylinder of germs and filthy bathrooms and lethargic personnel would have gotten high-grades.

The branding was good.

The upholding the values, standards and meaning of the brand was a swing and a miss. As we used to rag, "y'swing likea rusty gate."

Just as a good-looking swing is different from being a good hitter, most marketing people fail to understand that good branding does not make a good brand. Somehow as an industry, we've chosen to focus on the ephemeral, decorative aspects of being a brand and chosen to neglect the material and functional meaning of being a brand. Worse, we fail to consider the damage to the value of the brand that results from the subject-object split between how the brand looks and how the brand works.

Looks good/works bad is even more dangerous than looks bad/works bad. Because it's more disappointing. 

In the social media ad world as displayed daily by a thousand chimer-inners on LinkedIn and other social platforms, more and more people seem to be applauding more and more ads that are all show and no substance. They're not real. They're not newsy. They're not honest. And they're usually not based on anything other than shocking the viewer, thereby gaining talk value and awards-show-currency, aka notoriety.

These ads below, which have for the past week clogged my feeds like pubic hair in a boys' locker room shower-drain hurt our industry and the clients we purport to serve.

They're not only false they encourage a false narrative. 

It's time we got back to not looking good while striking out. But looking good while hitting the ball.

That takes two things.

1. Work based on a human insight.
2. Honesty.

PS. If you see a mother eating a fast food burger while nursing her baby, don't notify the judges at Cannes. Notify child protective services.

Anti-Fragility.

For the first approximately 55 years of my life, I had never really heard the word resilience. Today in the modern Ecch-o-system of life, I hear it with stomach-turning frequency.

You hear it about sports teams that bounce back from twelve runs behind, or who start the season 2-7 and then somehow manage to make the playoffs (though it seems nearly everyone makes the playoffs.) You hear it about people who had a crappy childhood and somehow overcame hardship. Or people who had some horrid disease or a bad, debilitating run of misfortune.

But mostly at least to my ears, you hear about companies that have resilient supply chains, or IT infrastructures, or who have rebounded from a serious downturn or skein of bad judgments. 

In fact, I never much thought about the word and its meaning. Most of the people I know and most of the companies I work for and with have a certain degree of resiliency. Who hasn't come back from adversity or, to some degree, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Most everyone I know has had something lousy happen to them--they've lost a job, somehow gotten into serious debt, or lost a loved one tragically. You keep going. That's life. Today, that's what we call "resilience."

Right now, I'm reading Eric H. Cline's great book, "After 1177 B.C.", which is part of the multi-volume Turning Points in Ancient History series. It's a sequel to the second picture below, "1177 B.C., the Year Civilization Collapsed."

Most people don't realize, the world of the eastern Mediterranean before 1177 B.C., was a pretty vibrant place. There was international travel, trade and exchange of ideas. Then, to misquote William Butler Yeats, the center stopped holding. And civilization after civilization--from the Egyptians to the Cretans, to the Cypriots, to the Babylonians, to the Assyrians, to the Anatolians, and more collapsed. 

For years, historians and archaeologists attributed such world-wide catastrophe to a mysterious people called the Sea People. No one knew where they came from or how they invaded the Mediterranean world--but the destruction of that world was attributed to those Sea People. For centuries global collapse was allegedly due to their advanced technologies (weapons and low-draft, fast ships and fierce deportment.)

However, more recently, historians and archaeologists have let the Sea People off the hook. Collapse was due to the same collection of forces that are affecting seemingly most of the world today. They include, "climate change, attacks by foreign enemies, social uprising, natural catastrophes, systems collapse, and changes in warfare.”

Those circumstances, 4000 years ago and today, almost inevitably lead to "(1) the collapse of the central administrative organization; (2) the disappearance of the traditional elite class; (3) a breakdown of the centralized economy; (4) a settlement shift; and (5) population decline. To these, as additional symptoms specifically of a dark age, I would add (6) a loss of writing; and (7) a pause in the construction of monumental architecture."

Now, after all that comes the point of today's post.

Cline cites a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb who  introduced me to the notion of the Black Swan event. (A Black Swan event is an unpredictable and unforeseen occurrence that has severe and widespread consequences.)

Taleb in writing about civilizations that endured the collapses of 1177 B.C. uses the phrase, “anti-fragile.” Not resiliency. Anti-fragility. 

Resiliency is bouncing back. 

Anti-fragile is more. Better. Stronger.

Anti-fragile people and systems and governments actually  “thrive under the right amount of stress.” They don't just get back up again. They take advantage of adversity. In dark times, they don't just survive--they flourish. 

Taleb says it best: Anti-fragile entities "gain from disorder.”

When I look back on my long life in the advertising business, I know no successful person, no successful agency that isn't, as you'd expect, resilient. 

Resiliency is the sine non qua--the essential element--of being a human. 

When I got fired by Ogilvy at the age of 62 for being too old, I wasn't merely resilient. I created a new way of creating for myself. I became better--smarter, faster, more-aggressive and more driven than I ever was before. I became more reliant on myself. I became more determined to succeed--for myriad reasons--nor the least of which was showing the WPPCPAs that their narrow-minded and larcenous modus operandi would not do me in.

Much of the work I do now is with start-ups and with technology companies. Working with them is a bit like working with yearling horses. Somedays they're riding high and they look like a shoo-in to run for the roses at Churchill Downs. Other days--they're yearlings, remember, they can barely make it out of the paddock. No one is born a champion. No one is a champion every day.

That takes work.

That takes anti-fragility.

--

BTW, Cline's books are frightening in their relevance to our world today. While he is not an "easy" writer and there's a lot of Aššur-reša-išis, wandering Aramaeans, and  Nebuchadnezzars to wade through, there are lessons to be learned and things to think. On nearly every page.

Would that the world's leaders actually read books about the world they purport to lead.

Promises. Promises.

It's Friday and I've been away all week. 

I've been away all week, on a long-overdue vacation, and I really didn't want to post.

But I did.

Some of that's my own neuroses. I worry that once I give people a chance, they'll flee from this space at the first opportunity. But more of my assiduousness is due to something else. Something elemental that, I'm fearful, most brands have forgotten.

This is as basic as it gets.

But still, most brands have forgotten it.

A brand is a promise.

A promise that whatever it is your brand does it does in a way that lives up to the standards of your brand. If you're a fast-food brand, or a grocery store, or an airline, you usually run ads that show your people smiling and helping customers. Your stores, or planes, are unimpeachably clean (in TV land) and your product is always in apple-pie order.

It's a brand's job not just to make promises to people but to keep them.

That includes ad agencies.

Which, my guess, probably have attrition rates that run around 40-percent. Which means their entire staff turns over every 2.5 years. 

Ad Aged is a blog. 

It's free.

I make no money on it.

But I have a good amount of readers and an even better measure of influence in the ad industry. My brand promise is simple. I write every day. Not because I want to. But because my readers expect that from me. After all, I promised. 

To a good brand, their word is their bond.

Yes, that's horribly naìve and kind of Andy of Mayberry or George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." And no, it would cost me nothing to not be so hard on myself--so demanding, so exacting in my standards.

But what you do is, to a brand, or a blog, or even a human being, what you do is who you are. And I'd rather be George Bailey than Donald Trump. (Trump has more money. But George was the richest man in town.)

Somehow, and here's the nub, we replaced brand behaviors with brand guidelines. Using your brand's logo incorrectly is a sin. Not training people, not paying people, and thereby accepting slovenly behavior from representatives of the brand is rife.

The ad industry no longer guides brand behaviors. When we did, we were located on Madison and Park Avenues. We were the first call made by corporate CEOs when there was a problem. We forgot that was important. So we talk about guidelines and voices and coloring within the brand-lines. 

We used to have nice offices and get paid well. Now we have hot-desks and are vendors subject to the sharp-pencils of procurement fava-counters.

We never ask the simplest of all questions.

The one I asked myself when I decided to write this week.

Is that brand keeping its promises?

Help.

I'm busy.

You're busy.

The whole world is busy.

And, as always, the world is too much with us.

Shit is happening.

Shit is happening everywhere.

In the world.

In our country.

In our neighborhood.

In our homes.

The last thing we want to think about is how reliable our unreliable ISP is. Or how great a deal our Speculum cable is. Or the splendors of a triple-play bundle with a torrent of mouse-type that makes Niagara look like a tear drop.

We don't want to think about bad-side-effect medicines for disease we don't have. Or car showrooms filled with balloons and bad lease deals. We don't want to think about pink-slime hamburgers or chicken fried in rat-lard.

We hate marketing.

We hate advertising.

Humans always have and always will.

People LinkIn-ify proclamations like that as if they're news. As if people from my generation (Eisenhower was president when I was born and the world was still in black-and-white) or my parents' generation (Herbert Hoover was president when they were born) LOVED marketing and commercials. 

"Honey, shush, an Old Gold commercial with a dancing cigarette box is on."

No. No. And more no.

People have always and will always hate banalities and interruptions. They have and always will hate being screamed at. They have and always will hate marketing.

5000 years ago around some stoa in Attika, people got pissed if a goat-cheese vendor interrupted the blind bard just as Hector was being dragged through the mud.  Do you think Homer wasn't interrupted by commercials? Do you think people welcomed those interruptions?

Grow up.

Whether you grew up in a time conniving gods, of five channels or 50,000, you do your best to avoid crap, junk, lies, things that insult your intelligence, boredom.

Our job as marketers is to help people on behalf of our clients. Our job as marketers is to help people by showing them the value, the ease, the joy, the saliency of the product or service we represent in our messages. 

This isn't new. 

This is Gossage.

Or, as above, Homer. And not Simpson.

People don't read ads (or like ads, or respond to ads) the read (or like or respond) to what interests them and sometimes that's an ad.

I spend my days and nights visiting clients. 

Sitting in fluorescent ceiling-tiled rooms seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...Those minds giving me lists of bullet points and mandatories and clichés that they're sure will make "consumers," "users" or "the target" buy their thing without us as marketers every working hard enough to explain to those consumers, users, targets--you know, people--how our clients' thing actually helps them--is good for them, can comfort their afflictions or afflict their comforts.

My job as an agency is to find things out about my clients' products and services that are actually valuable to the people they want to sell to.

SSo when people--go to the store, regardless of where the store is, regardless if it's real or virtual, and when those people are confronted by a spate of bullshit, confusion, blandishments and deceptions, they can find solace, even succor in my brand.

Let your brand serve people. Help people. 

   Let your brand organize a supermarket with 16,000 products and reduce that supermarket to 35 products so people can get in and out in 15 minutes, not 90 minutes. Let your brand do the same for the strip of road that has eleven different car dealerships all specializing in selling the same ugly SUV for $67,000, not including transportation fees and dealer prep. 

That's what advertising is supposed to do:

Inform. Entertain. And help.

It's that simple.

I

T

Naïveté.

I read something the other day in a pretty heady book I just finished reading. 

I had always--perhaps ignorantly--assumed that a community's population would be maintained if each two people had two children. Two people have children, two people die, it all evens out. At least that's what I assumed.

However, according to David Miles in "The Tale of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain," reproduction rates of about 2.2–2.3 children are required to keep the population steady. That's because along the way, about ten-percent (the .2 to .3) of children die before they reproduce.

Of course that makes sense. There are diseases, accidents, violence. All kinds of things happen to us. Speaking both colloquially and ontologically, as far as life goes, "there's many a slip twixt cup and lip." i.e. shit happens. Or as Moby Dick said so many voyages ago, shit harpoons.

In other words, life is hard. 

And no one gets out of it alive. 

As Paul Simon wrote in his great song, "An American Tune,"

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

Like Mr. Simon, I don't know a soul who ain't been battered. I scarcely know anyone who hasn't suffered some terrible hurt along the way--hurts that don't rectify themselves via Hallmark cards and sappy LinkedIn imprecations and banal homilies about picking ourselves up.

Yet, in advertising the world we depict in our spots could hardly be more removed from the reality of the world we live in. You need only look at a car commercial--any car commercial--to see what I mean. Life in car commercials is driving on traffic-less roads or off-roading on an empty beach while lip synching to some classic rock anthem. 

According to our industry, the biggest problem amerikans face is who gets the last nacho chip. About 93% of amerikan commercials beckon you to ask your doctor, when the fact is 93% of amerikans can no long afford to even see a doctor.

I schtumbled across this long article the other day. I'm not sure how it found me, or I found it, but here we are. 

It's not hard to proffer another of Gioia's triptych's for the ad industry.

From long copy print ads, to :30s, to :06s.

From here's how we can help you, to we'll make you happy, to what a celebrity thinks.

As an industry, as a society, I worry that we've forgotten. We've forgotten that we're not just to be selling and yelling, we're supposed to be helping people improve their lives through our clients' products.

Maybe this is childish on my part. Naive.

But the best advertising has always helped people. 

As Carl Ally once said, "Advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."

That sounds right to me.

And I'm going to keep trying.

--

PS. Ad Aged is on vacation this week.
Posting but later than usual.

You Make Me Bizzy Miss Lizzy.

If you don't read John McWhorter who writes for the New York Times and who's an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University (spoiler alert: Linguistics is not a form of Italian pasta) you're really missing out. Language, in many ways, is what makes humans human. And understanding how words form and languages are used is a window into how people, cultures and communities think.

Last week, McWhorter wrote an article on the vibrancy of our language--much of which, he laments--is no longer being taught in schools. He starts his piece recalling a language exercise he was given while in seventh grade.

When I think about language, and my own fascination with words, I think much of that comes from being raised an outsider--a Jew in a Gentile world. Because my parents didn't grow up speaking English, when they learned English I think they were more attuned to its vibrancy. Outsiders are almost always better observers than insiders. It might be why so many of the people who guide amerikan culture come from outside of the main avenues of amerikan life. 

Billy Wilder, for instance, who won six Academy Awards and was nominated for a total of twenty-one, didn't speak English until he came to this country--escaping the nazis--at the age of nearly 30. His ear for language came from not knowing the language.

But enough of all that tongue twisting.

What really got me from McWhorter's piece was the off-register type at the top of this post. And his brief look into the derivation of the word "business."

As someone who has a full-time job but who works independently, I am an outsider to the business world. I work with business people, but I'm not one of them. I run GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company as my business, but as a business, GeorgeCo, LLC, is completely without rules, strictures and protocols. 

I win pitches, get assignments, do scopes, do the work, sell the work, revise the work, and sometimes produce the work. But I do it all without formality. I do it in a way that accommodates how I think, live, breathe and walk Sparkle, my one-year-old golden retriever. I do it in a way that lets me do business with a minimum of busy-ness.

So, when I got to McWhorter's exegesis on the word, it was especially interesting to me. 

“Business” starts with “busy,” and the first mystery about busy is why it’s spelled that way. We are so used to seeing it that we may not notice how weird it is....So how do we get 'business'? 

"A Scottish poem called 'The King’s Book,' from around 1400, describes “the little squirrel, full of busyness.” There was even an opposite word, busiless.

"Today, however, you don’t really think of this word as meaning a state of being busy. That is partly because we pronounce it not “busy-ness” but “bizzness.” Unmoored from that audible connection, its meaning has been free to drift its own way, although if you squint you can sense the original meaning in a sentence like 'Knock off that ‘Stranger Things’ business and get to work!'”

When I think about how much I am able to get done in a given day, how GeorgeCo's yearly revenue probably outstrips that of all but a handful of global agencies, it's because I have (productively) eliminated the busy-ness from my business.

I don't have endless meetings.
I have a way to create accurate scopes in minutes not days.
And I am able to reach the highest level of clients to get briefed so as not to be bogged down and confounded by an elaborate game of corporate "telephone," where the more the message is relayed the more it gets muddled.

Somewhere along the way, our corporate culture has conflated looking busy with getting things done. We've equated nervous activity with accomplishment. We've likened a long to-do list with actually doing.

Nothing could be further from reality.

Maybe busy-ness will show your boss how valuable you are. Becuase if you're so busy you have to work all night and work all weekend, it makes you feel important. But it makes me think of a bit I read by John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist who wrote this in his 1958 book, "The Great Crash of 1929." (BTW, Galbraith's book is great and accessible. And, I fear, burning in its relevance.)

"Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action."

Busy?

Editors’ Picks

Redecorating? A Quick Trip to the Grocery Store May Be All You Need.

With Stickers on Phone Cameras, Clubs Defend the Party Vibe

New R.S.V. Vaccines Had Limited Takers Last Year. Will This Year Be Better?

Some words go abstract. We say “It’s none of your business” as a single chunk and think nothing of it, but it’s an odd expression. It doesn’t refer to a business in the dictionary sense. It means, “It isn’t something that you are supposed to busy yourself about.” Things went even further with an expression my parents used to playfully use, saying “Nunya” as a shortening of “It’s none of your business,” in the same way as “goodbye” began as “God be with you.”

Then business was used even more abstractly in the old-timey expression “like nobody’s business” which meant “to an extreme degree.” This is where “So Long Letty” comes in.

Letty runs a beauty shop, something considered kind of racy in a time when ordinary women were just beginning to wear makeup. She sings about her clients:

You ought to see ’em
When Letty gets through with ’em
Oh, what I do with ’em
It’s nobody’s business!

But how does this refer to business at all? Think also of “Give him the business!” or an animal “doing its business.” None of these uses have anything to do with capitalism.

I hope I do not seem to expatiate (it means to go on at length). But there is no reason that the basics of linguistics — how sounds actually work, why sentences come out the way they do, how language changes over time, how children learn language — should be taught only to college students who intentionally seek them out. We teach schoolchildren about many types of transformation, including history and evolution. Why not the one they encounter every time they open their mouths to speak? (Incidentally, to get a sense of what a romp language and linguistics can be, I highly recommend a smart and also gorgeous card-based game League of the Lexicon. It’s a feast for the inquiring mind and even smells good.)