Antonym Words Edition
Five minute warning… take shelter in these rabbit-holes.
Dear Reader
Highlight of this week?
Seeing this rain coming in to wash away the heatwave in Brighton
In the days preceding the deluge The New York Times had to explain to its readers that air-con was the exception rather than the rule in the UK (left) while coping tips were everywhere (see my improvised ice+fan contraption).
They didn’t see that coming (etc.)...
VICE reports that large numbers of psychics and tarot readers are having their identities stolen so that scammers can sell extra nonsense to their fans:
Impersonation is becoming one of the hottest issues in the world of mystical labor, because it’s simply so pervasive; one tarot reader told Motherboard they’ve been impersonated at least 15 times. The scammers typically copy all of their target’s photos and captions, create a new Instagram account that mirrors theirs as much as possible, and then start following and messaging people who follow the target. The impersonators—who often address the follower as “beloved” or “dear”—say they felt irresistibly compelled to reach out, that they need to urgently tell them something from their spirit guides, and offer to give the follower a reading, always for a price.
COACHES CLASS
In unrelated news, there is a massive boom in executive coaching according to the FT:
The number of coaches has jumped, according to the ICF, which saw membership climb from 33,594 in 2019 to 56,076 at the end of June. Its last survey (in 2019) estimated the total global revenue from coaching to be $2.8bn, a 21 per cent increase on 2015, due to the rising number of coaches, while the average fee rate dipped.
Better Up, a coaching platform, analysed hundreds of thousands of its own sessions, which showed that since March 2020 there has been a rise in discussions of “stress management and self-care”, as well as “managing difficult conversations and conflict” and “communication and collaboration”.
I think I owe my continuing sanity to having access to coaching from some brilliant professionals at the Centre for Teams. I’ve also provided coaching as part of our business, as Chair of a charity and to private clients. It’s rewarding on both sides of the relationship. If you’re interested in getting a coach, I recommend word of mouth recommendations, and always having a set number of sessions even after a trial so you can manage the relationship on both sides without having to “break up”, as it were. Also check out the self-coaching course from Ed Batista, who ran the course as part of Stanford University’s Executive MBA, and made all the materials freely available during lockdown.
Occasionally I hear a cynical comment that a lot of coaching is just common sense. That sentiment seems to assume that there’s no shortage of common sense in the world, or that you never misplace your personal supply of the stuff. So often the most useful coaching sessions are someone really listening to you and helping you hear what you’re actually saying.
OHOTB (OVERHEARD ON THE BEACH)
A new antonym feature which probably won’t last in which I feature weird things people say on the beach in Brighton.
You do as little as you can when you’re on a building site. When I was a labourer I did the bare minimum. My mate Sam sat in a cupboard for five hours the other day.
[Name changed to protect the work-shy.]
Can I give you some feedback?
Feedback is so useful and yet so hard to get right. Esther Bintliff in the FT provides a highly useful exploration of the science of feedback starting with a personal anecdote.
Years ago, after I received some negative feedback at work, my husband Laurence told me something that stuck with me: when we receive criticism, we go through three stages. The first, he said, with apologies for the language, is, “Fuck you.” The second is “I suck.” And the third is “Let’s make it better.”
I recognised immediately that this is true, and that I was stuck at stage two.
She goes on to talk to the author of Radical Candor—a brilliant book—who had her book-and-theory given the roughest kind of public feedback, being a joke about bullies wrapping their behaviour in her colours, and write a second edition of the book to address it. Perfect.
Health and safety gone mad
Now that the UK has thrown off the shackles of EU health and safety red tape (and free market, free movement and other benefits of being part of the world’s largest trading block) presumably we can get back to the kind of pragmatic, hands-on, test-and-learn innovation depicted in this footage from the 1930s:
Word Of The Week
A special request feature from two loyal subscribers, this section will last as long as I remember to put it in.
This week’s Word Of The Week (WOTW) comes from a passive aggressive note—ironically drafted as an official press release—pinned on the internet’s fridge door by Emirates, an airline that flies those enormous A380 double-deckers around our ever-warming globe.
The word is:
Bottomline
Formed from a two-word phrase “bottom line”, which was originally an accounting term: the profit or loss number at the bottom of a table of a company’s accounts. Its meaning drifted into a synonym for “final outcome”, “skip to the end” or “cut the crap and tell me what this means”. (For a full explanation of “bottom line”, The Grammarist has you covered, including a mention of its inevitable verbing, but even then it is still two words.)
Many cheered the unusually direct and aggressive comms by Emirates, but in their corporate fury, the Emirati-communicati—as they should definitely call themselves— inadvertently invented a compound noun: bottomline.
The whole statement, which is—wow—worth a read, passes screening by the main (Word, Google Docs) spell-checkers, but one gets the sense that someone very senior wrote it and gave instructions IN CAPS that “no it doesn’t need sign off”, especially the para that gave life to our WOTW:
The bottomline is, the LHR management team are cavalier about travellers and their airline customers. All the signals of a strong travel rebound were there, and for months, Emirates has been publicly vocal about the matter. We planned ahead to get to a state of readiness to serve customers and travel demand, including rehiring and training 1,000 A380 pilots in the past year.
It was all sorted out a few days later, but there was less attention to the make-up hug than the argument. A Heathrow exec pointed out that the problem was a shortage of ground staff who are contracted by, er, the airlines.
And five ten words of the month…
Do you see what happens when I get a reader request? Do you see? Bottomline is I OVER-DELIVER.
Because, I will now be both cavalier and publicly vocal about one of those Twitter bots that delivers gems consistently. New New York TImes tweets a single word when that word is used for the first time in the newspaper of Gotham. For instance, “Airmageddon” was one of the words, first used on July 16th reporting on Heathrow’s aforementioned troubles.
Looking back over its output for the last month, these are my five ten faves:
Anthropulse
Nostaliagified
Unsquarable
Epiphanically
Whimsicruelty
Rematriate
Metadramatic
Headsmacking
Unerpeopled
What a bot! And to think Elon Musk is headed for the billion-dollar buffers in the Delaware courts over Twitter having too many bots. They’re not all bad, Elon!
And standing by that statement is the companionbot (I can noun too) NYT Bibliography which tweets back at the NYT_first_said bot saying how many times that word has been used in books previously:
This week I’m
Writing…
Like the storm-breaking words began to flow this week. My company published this piece “The CMO’s Dilemma” as part of its regular newsletter. Here’s a little excerpt:
Caught between a landslide of challenges and an operational hard place.
For any dilemma, there is a rock and there is a hard place. The protagonist can’t turn one way and they can’t turn the other. There is a way out, there always is. But they’re damned if they can see it. Terrifying or enlivening—depending on your viewpoint.
Pause. Breathe. Think about the problem again from a different perspective. Gather some more data. Ask what the hero would have done. What the villain would have done. Think of all those times you prevailed against the odds. What got you through it? What was the secret?
Contributing…
I contributed some thoughts to Neil Perkin’s new report for the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) on client agency relationships and how to make them work for both parties. You can download it here.There’s some really good analysis here and new ways of thinking about how relationships work. The bit that made me raise an eyebrow of wry recognition was the “double smile”:
Revenue of course comes from what people actually pay for, but it is better strategy and better results analysis that are so often what clients say they want.
Reading…
Rule Britannia by Daphne Du Maurier. I’m surprised it took me so long to read this. Written in the early 70s, it imagines the UK being occupied by the US after crashing out of the EU precursor (the EEC).
Growing up in the oh-my-god-it-might-happen Cold War era Oxfordshire I saw cruise missile convoys pass through villages, went to school with US military kids, and saw a friend’s Dad return from a day’s RAF exercise in gas masks and chemical warfare gear. Once I heard the Brize Norton air-raid alarm go off across the Thames Valley and really believed our last moments had come. When The The sang about the UK becoming the 51st state of the USA, and it really didn’t seem that fanciful.
This was 1983. In case you think I’m being melodramatic — here’s the Queen’s speech drafted for the start of a nuke attack.
Anyway, for different reasons, it feels topical all over again and it is also a fabulously gripping read. (Thanks to Heloise for the recommendation!)
Watching …
Black Bird. Black Bird. Black Bird. That is all.
Listening…
Sitting in the garden I’m called upon by Mrs Antonym to magic a suitable playlist for ambiance. The brief is baggy—“something nice and summery” and cut through with jeopardy—the client will let me know in moments if she doesn’t like the music.
For reasons too boring to explain I have Spotify and Apple Music to choose from. Spotify is a miracle of user-friendliness. I prefer Apple Music in many ways—interface, the magical properties of its sound quality— but it can’t do this…
I’ve long loved the suggested songs feature on the service. Add two or three beloved tracks and you’ll get suggestions of other tunes that might work. But I’d not seen the iPad version (pictured) until this week. I’d just added “Mercy Mercy Me” by Marvin Gaye and was presented by several columns of songs that were similar, suggested, and then several genre variations on this theme.
Incroyable! Time saved, long-forgotten favourites revived, new artists found. It’s like having that music-obsessed friend who always made the best mix-tapes in the room with you.
The client loved didn’t complain about the results.
Bottomline: That’s it
Thank you for reading — I hope there was something to amuse your bouche or brain.
Don’t forget to validate me my liking this article or subscribing, sharing, sending uninvited feedback etc…
Antony
PS More bits
There are so many things that I would like to write more about this week. I’ll take bids on hearing more about any of the following in next week’s newsletter:
Book burners update: The book ban movement has a chilling new tactic: harass teachers on social media | MIT Technology Review
Who’s groomin’ who? How influencers’ fans turn them into extremists: The Perils of Audience Capture | The Prism (via The Bluestocking)
Amazon: How Ecommerce Group Became the World’s Third Largest Digital Advertising Player
Bullshit? Web3 brands join forces to create ‘Open Metaverse Alliance’
Pitch, please. Dramatic Drop in Number of Clients Awarding New Business
PPS And finally…
I love Star Wars. My brother LOVES Star Wars.
This is his bottle opener. (Which I actually now covet.)
