Sloppy House

I just finished reading Timothy Taylor’s Story House, and I must say that I was terribly distracted throughout. Those distractions led to my humble disappointment, which was a surprise, because I really enjoyed the first book.

Perhaps the ridiculous success of the first book can be blamed. I don’t know. Maybe his star was shining too brightly in his editor’s eyes. All I know is that this book was full of (what I consider to be) glaring mistakes.

I must confess that the story itself must have been interesting enough. I finished the book, and I see now that I started marking the pages with mistakes when I was half way through. I did enjoy the basic story. It’s not often that you get to read about an architect (unless you’ve read The Fountainhead). The story was full of angst, conflicted genius, family drama and conflict, illegal aliens, counterfeit goods (and counterfeits of counterfeits)., the Russian mafia, biker gangs, and boxing.

The overall annoyance is that Taylor has picked up the annoying habit of writing in fragments and extremely long comma splices. That’s in general. There are some simple specific examples of misplaced words: “Smartest for being able to say what she knew calmly, not exploding with emotion or some violent denial thereof”. 

That’s an annoying passage. I was slightly tired when reading that passage, and I had to re-read it in order to understand it. 

Here’s a sentence without a verb: “And all around Zweigler, the city Gordan had chosen to live in but hardly touch.” Is it too much to ask for a verb? Is He above using them?

Another classic sloppy modifier: “Now he was squinting at what she’d given him in disbelief.” Is it necessary for me to explain that she hadn’t given it to him in disbelief, but that he was squinting at it in disbelief?

And again with the sloppiness: “There was a cove she’d never seen before with a crescent of black sand, space to beach and a strip of accessible forest.” I’m going to ignore the lack of serial comma because some say that’s a style choice. (It’s the wrong choice, but I’m going to be generous.) But what about this cove? What had she seen it with before if it wasn’t with the black sand?

On that same page, Taylor describes another scene. “There was a particular tide-free rock with teeming bird life.” I had to look up “teem”. It either means “to be full of” or “to pour out or empty”. So were the birds pregnant or throwing up?

And finally, a classic mistake appears near the end of the book. This one, to me, almost proves that there was no editor, or that the editor didn’t even bother. Taylor describes the inside of an abandoned, wrecked ship. “She imagined its internal structures. The lay of its passages. Where the bridge lead down to the galleys by ladder.”

There you have it, a non-existant word. The correct word is “led”.

This book was published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada. But who knows who edited it?

I understand that this book wasn’t nearly as successful as the other one. With all the sentence fragments and confusing writing, I think that I have a bit of an idea why.

Oh, Canada

On this day when most Canadians are celebrating the birth of this country, what it means to be Canadian, and what it’s like to live in Canada, I’m obsessing over an example of what doesn’t make this country great. I picked up a little “program” for the local Canada Day celebration. What is most local to me is the festivities that are being held in Cloverdale at the Cloverdale Amphitheatre, an outdoor venue that was built for the day when the world was going to end.

There is a stellar line-up of free entertainment, including a triple-bill of 80s bands: Rhymes with Orange, The Payola$, and the international megaband, Loverboy.

Whoever created this little program did their best to create content. There is a short write-up titled “SURREY – 2010 Venue City”. I had to read this short article because I was curious. Up until this article, I hadn’t heard of any Surrey involvement in the 2010 Winter Olympics.

This article, so short, features a classic derailment: “Surrey will be home to the Games Preparation Centre from February 2009 until the end of the Games; it will then become a multi-purpose recreational facility for Surrey residents.”

Can you spot the derailment? Can you name the mistake?

The topic in the first half of the sentence is “Surrey”. The second part of the sentence starts with the “it” after the semi-colon. This “it” is an antecedent, and should logically refer to “Surrey”, the topic in the first half.

But it doesn’t. Instead, the writer has switched the topic of the second half of the sentence to “the Games Preparation Centre”. If it didn’t, then the writer would have us believe that Surrey is turning into a multi-purpose recrecational facility. That can’t happen.

So on Canada Day, I’m forced to think about how the education system is failing the residents and about pronoun-antecedent breakdown.

Oh, Canada.

Rock, Paper, Bubbles

This is my first entry on design.

 Yesterday, China officially opened/unveiled one of the marquis venues for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Nicknamed the “Watercube”, the National Aquatics Center is also the center of controversy. Detractors have declared the modern, square building that looks like a slice of bubbles non-traditional and non-Chinese. That seems like a lot of fuss for what is essentially a mass of bubbles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See it lit up at night, and a couple of renderings of the inside.

I think that this building is quite charming. It’s clever. It’s fun. And it’s not pretentious. And I think that’s exactly what these kinds of large-scale, event-specific types of buildings should be. Sure, the design is not traditional. Who says that it has to be? We’re struggling with that issue of tradition here in Vancouver for our winter Olympics in 2010. But interestingly, our problem is the opposite of China’s, and yet the results are also reversed.

 China has a strong cultural identity and long history; Canada is a relatively young country that has welcomed people from every country in the world, and therefore has a bit of an identity crisis. You would think that identity crisis would leave us free to have fun with the architecture for our Olympic venues. However, we are ending up with somewhat modern, characterless, uninteresting “legacies” such as the Richmond Oval.

Inspired, isn’t it? I don’t have the language to talk about the design of this building. I’m not an architect. But I can say this: It’s neutral, in a “we’re not snubbing or stealing from anyone’s culture” kind of way. It’s safe. It’s bland. It’s cottage cheese (except cottage cheese looks more like the Watercube. See the spectacular building pictured above).

Professional discourse

Yes, I’m really good with this professional blog. Perhaps I’m daunted by the “professional” aspect of it. In that case, I’ll try to let my hair down a little.

 I chose to write about professional discourse this time around because I had  to show up for a company-wide town hall meeting this morning. These meetings are usually a snore-fest just because of the hour (7am). But to that, the big chiefs decide to throw in too much jargon for me, and I assume most people, to follow. They use too many catch phrases, abbreviations, initialisations, and words they’ve stolen and changed the meaning of. It’s not communicative at all.

Here’s a short list of the words that annoyed me this morning. I managed to remember this list by using a catchy little mnemonic: GLIMS. I was so mad that they didn’t use hateful words starting with P and E so I could make a real word. That might be a small sign of obsessive/compulsive disorder. I’ll have to get that checked. Anyhow, here’s the list of management-appropriated, newly coined business-speak words:

Grow: This one has been around for a long time. They use it in the context of “grow a business”. I think this one irks me because to me, growth is organic, natural, and for the most part, not influenced. Sure, we can mix good soil, buy good seeds, plant them in the proper conditions, water, fertilize, etc. But in the end, it’s really up to nature what happens next. So when someone says “grow the business”, it’s all I can do to stay in my chair.

Leverage: This one has been around for a while, too. They used it in the context of “we leveraged our position”. No, you took advantage of your position. You made use of your position. In basic language, it means the action of a lever. As a transitive verb, it means to supplement with a lever ( a rigid bar with a fixed point). It’s not as active as they think it is.

Indirect spend: Now we’re getting to the good stuff. When they say “indirect spend”, they mean the stuff you paid for that didn’t contribute directly to the benefit of your customer/client. It apparently means things like office supplies, travel expenses, office chairs, etc…anything that doesn’t directly benefit your customer/client. The objective is to keep the indirect spending down. When I heard this, I was outraged. What about the poor lowly office workers? Don’t they deserve a chair that doesn’t put their left leg to sleep or a screen that doesn’t cause eye strain? Don’t we/they deserve fun little post-its (even though they are a little wasteful)? Then I thought…is this why we didn’t get a damn Christmas party? Because it wouldn’t directly benefit anyone but us? OUTRAGE!

 Metric: This is my new favourite pet peeve. From what I understand, this means math, or calucalations, or something full of information. They referred to “this metric” and “that metric” all morning. I saw tables. The tables had numbers…percentages and totals and dollar amounts (oh, my). So I think that metrics=math, or at least some sort of accounting thing. Can’t they just say “let’s take a look at the numbers” like they did on tv?

Space: This one took me a minute. It is almost exclusively used in conjunction with “adjacent”, as in “adjacent space”. During this morning’s meeting, this phrase was used to refer to industries and companies that they bought over the year which are related to our industry. The related industries occupy “related space”. For instance, let’s say that your company makes light bulbs. You see that a lamp-making company is for sale. You decide to buy it because it occupies “adjacent space” to your company. It’s all so stupid. Isn’t it easier to say “we make lightbulbs; they make lamps. Wouldn’t that work well together?”

Perhaps this isn’t why I’m an entrepreneur (DON’T get me started on that one) or businessman. Or, perhaps it’s just because I’m not that smart.

Now I open it up to you: tell me about the business words you hear that either drive you crazy or seem to be the opposite of communicative.

The Colour Purple

After rereading the entire Harry Potter catalogue, I needed a break from the thrill of fantasy. So I turned to my trusty pile of books found in the cheap pile at the Canadian mega-bookstore, and found a dandy little book called “Letter Perfect: The A-to-Z History of our Alphabet.”

The cover boasts that it is “a handsome and sprightly abecedary that tells the story of O, finds the spot marked by X, and explains why Samuel Johnson (or Iohnson?) skipped J in his landmark Dictionary.” It sounded like the perfect follow up to the adventures of the boy wizard.

I wasn’t being sarcastic when I wrote that. I do think that these books are somewhat related. After rereading the first six Harry Potter books, and while waiting for the seventh to be released, I read a book, also found on the cheap pile, which claimed to have deciphered and noted all the hidden secrets and clues in the Harry Potter series. It had been written after the fourth book had been released, and had not been too successful in predicting how the rest of the series would develop. However, the book was successful in one area: it discussed in detail how J. K. Rowling created much of the vocabulary in the books. The author broke the words down into components, hypothesizing on the Latin, Greek, and possibly Germanic roots of the words. This added to the depth of the books, making them that much more enjoyable.

And now I’m reading this other, non-fiction book, which dissects language down to the most basic written elements: the letters. Although I’m barely 20 pages in, it’s already been interesting and informative.

In a discussion about the Phoenicians, whose alphabet on 1000 B.C. was the basis for almost all of the world’s current written languages, the author explains one of the myths associated with the colour purple. The word Phoenician comes from an ancient Greek word Phoinikes, which could refer to the Phoenicians’ prized textile dye colour: purple. The dye was extracted from dead sea mollusks’ bodies through a secret process, and was the Phoenicia’s prime luxury product and export. The colour became an international status symbol which could only be afforded by the very rich, namely royalty. This association between royalty and the colour purple endures through the 20th century.

In 1982, Alice Walker used the colour purple in a completely different context in a discussion about faith. Two main characters in her book, The Color Purple, talk about what God does to please people. One character explains “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” In 1985, Oprah Winfrey starred in the movie version of Walker’s book; in 2005, Winfrey produced the Broadway musical. I’m sure that there was an story about it in Oprah’s magazine, O.

First (hopefully) wise words

In an attempt to be more professional, I’ve started this “professional” blog. Since finishing school a couple of months ago, I feel that my professionalness has faltered. Like some classmates, I feel all the knowledge and skills I gained over the previous two years slipping from my mental grasp. This blog is my attempt to keep a firm grip.

As you can see from my header, I have a bit of a identity problem. This stems from my interest in the interplay of words and visual elements. It’s all important…the words, the layout, the images. For me, it’s difficult to see words separately from the visual elements of the page or screen.

In this blog, I hope to discuss intelligently all these elements…the words, the layout, the images. But seriously, I’ll probably use this blog to bitch about how people write and design. Words and images. That’s what this is all about.