Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

We All Need Words point out that we hear “That’s not what I was taught at school” are words we hear a lot. They post five unrules:

5. Write short or ‘fragmented’ sentences.
4. Split infinitives.
3. Use contractions (eg that’s instead of that is).
2. Don’t sign off letters with ‘Yours Sincerely if you know the person you’re writing to or ‘Yours Faithfully’ if you don’t.
1. And you can start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’.

And a bonus rule from Kurt Vonnegut:

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

Ignore Microsoft Word’s green squiggly line. Dare I say, ignore Word altogether. There. Just in time for school.

The work of artist Leora Lutz deals with language and the landscape:

I am particularly fascinated with ephemeral and invisible lines,
whether man-made or natural. They reveal secrets of how we interact
with our surroundings or how we communicate with each other:
plane flights that eventually end at a destination,
words that disappear into the void of hearing,
gun shots that travel unseen until impact,
the melting of ice to create a small pool,
a fable gone wrong,
life and death,
a memory.

Most recently she traced the “flight path” of a single word at a time with line drawings:

The word strata was translated into a flight path drawing that is sewn onto the canvas. Each locations coordinates used to calculate the path begin with the letters s-t-r-a-t-a.

If you look to the very bottom of each, you’ll see the atlas lists that generate the flight paths are sewn onto the bottom of each painting. Don’t miss the details of mapping language at large, or small.

Mr. Palomar’s guidelines for keeping quiet, or rather saying his mind, in public:

In a time and in a country where everyone goes out of his way to announce opinions or hand down judgments, Mr. Palomar has made a habit of biting his tongue three times before assuring anything. After the third bite, if he is still convinced of what he was going to say, he says it. If not, he keeps his mouth shut. In fact, he spends whole weeks, months in silence.

Later:

‘Silence can also be considered a kind of speech, since it is a rejection of the use to which others put words; but the meaning of this silence-speech lies in its interruptions in what is, from time to time, actually said, giving a meaning to what is unsaid. Or rather: a silence can serve to dismiss certain words or hold them in reserve for use on a better occasion. Just as a word spoken now can save a hundred words tomorrow or else can necessitate the saying of another thousand. “Every time I bite my tongue,” Mr. Palomar concludes mentally, “I must think not only of what I am about to say or not say, but also of everything that, whether I say it or do not say it, will be said or not said by others.” Having formulated this thought, he bites his tongue and remains silent.’
—Italo Calvino, “On biting the tongue,” Mr. Palomar In Society

On the second time at the moment.

(thx, Erica)

Adam Gopnick on the feral parakeets of Brooklyn and the people who travel to see them:

Jen often takes the number 2 out from Park Slope, where she lives, to look at the parakeets, and she is often with her boyfriend, Jason. Jen is a birder but a democratic one. As a girl in Fairfax, Virginia, she kept pigeons — real city pigeons. She is a small, intently pretty young woman who has the eager eyes, quick mind, and you’d-be-amazed-how-much-fun-the-subway-can-be avidity of the new New Yorker.

Subways are a space in New York where it’s OK to look at people’s eyes. Not to make eye contact, but to look. “Are you alright? Is everything OK?” I want to ask the woman with the swollen eyes, who’s gripping the baby, uncomfortable, distant. “Is it OK?” I want to ask the bespectacled woman, frantic to study stapled papers over the Venti coffee. “Is anything OK?” I want to ask the newly soaped man with the perfect devices. “Are we OK?” I want to pose the question to the car. But the subway rolls on, and it’s too loud anyway.

“You’d hear them at first, but they’re not hard to see,” Jen says of the parakeets. “They’re real New Yorkers.”

Photographer Steve Stewart is always looking for the unguarded moment, and has found it most often when people are reading (and part II). His new book explores the relationship between reading and art:

We are familiar with words describing images, but not so familiar with images describing words and the impact reading has on our lives. Artists from Rembrandt to Picasso have explored the interaction of people with their books. Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old, rich and poor, reading books. Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular, they are, for a time, transported to another world. Reading a good book is a universal activity, and people read while they do just about everything else.

Stewart quoting Susan Sontag:

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality… ” The same can be said for reading books.

As someone who feels equal parts intimate and a visitor while deep in a book, I love this definition. Perhaps this dichotomy may fare well for some in other places.

The Economist summarizes a study from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business showing how to tell when a CEO is lying:

Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.

By analyzing the linguistic features present during 30,000 conference calls by CEOs and CFOs the study also found:

[D]eceptive CEOs use significantly fewer self-references, more third person plural and impersonal pronouns, more extreme positive emotions, fewer extreme negative emotions, and fewer certainty and hesitation words.

Give CEOs a pencil and paper and listen well, and you too can detect horsefeathers.

[via]

Paul Graham on what he looks for in a YCombinator application:

We don’t look for any particular thing. We just look for people who have a habit of being great. Just so long as when they do things, they tend to do them well.

That and “be succinct; don’t just blather on ad infinitum,” he points out. Not unlike what Jim Coudal has emphasized about interviews with two candidates when both are equally talented, “I will always hire the one who can write.” So you know.

Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: “design for life”. In a healthy society this design for life will encourage every profession and vocation to play its part since the degree of relatedness in all their work gives to any civilization its quality. This implies that it is desirable that everyone should solve his special task with the wide scope of a true “designer” with the new urge to integrated relationships. It further implies that there is no hierarchy of the arts, painting photography, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, nor of any other fields such as industrial design. They are equally valid departures toward the fusion of function and content in design.

This from László Moholy-Nagy in 1947 in Vision in Motion, a compendium of the modern movement. Moholy-Nagy, best known for teaching at the Bauhaus until 1928, and director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 until its closing one year later.

Whether in academia or profession — or, more telling, places that blur the lines between — as relevant now as it was then, if not more so.