All for the love of Marmite (and Latin)

Have you heard of the Marmarati? They are, notionally, the secret society of fanatical Marmite lovers, the chosen few who get to express and celebrate their obsessive love for the yeast-based spread on a variety of social media platforms.

The Marmarati are the product of (or, you might say, they simply are) a social media campaign by We are social. It’s a neat bit of brand-as-movement campaign-building, a sort of next step from initiatives like the Cadbury’s For The Love Of Wispa campaign. And, as befits any decent secret society, especially in the post-Dan Brown era, they have a Latin motto.

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The Dictionary of Change

Every year, with a certain regularity, various newspapers, publishing houses, bloggers and other organs of social commentary like to announce their words of the year: lexical items which, for their editors, embody some truth about language, current affairs, popular culture, technology or similar from the year in question. The most widely publicised of these (and among the most thoughtfully chosen) are typically those by lexicographers and linguists, especially those by the New Oxford American Dictionary (which picked ‘unfriend’ as its word for 2009) and the American Dialect Society (which picked ‘tweet’). These picks are always fun, even where they are less insightful than the NOAD and ADS selections. As well as telling us a little about trends in pop culture, their endurance reflects both an interest in the formation and propagation of new (or newish) words and a continued belief that there is an intimate, or at least interesting, connection between language change and culture change.

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iPads, iPods and consumer phonology

Apple has launched the iPad and got everybody talking. There have been questions about the concept and gags about the name.

Being the smart kind of company it is, Apple probably monitors its media spend and return on media investment quite carefully. I’d expect it, as with any big brand in the industry, to keep a close eye on its share of voice, to monitor buzz and even to monitor sentiment. Brands, after all, need to be good at listening to their consumers.

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The evolution of reading

The University of California at San Diego’s 2009 How Much Information? report estimates Americans’ total leisure-time consumption of information (measured in hours, words and bytes - see the report’s methodology), based on existing household panel, census and survey data. One of the headlines making the news (see here, for example) is the estimate that since 1960 reading as a way of receiving information has grown in proportion and absolute volume. As the report puts it: Read the rest of this entry »

29% more boring stories about your gap year

Powerchex, a pre-employment screening company, has informed the world (via the Guardian) that under-21s ‘told 29% more lies on job applications this year than last’.

Leaving aside potential conflicts of interests arising from companies who sell services conducting research into the extent of need for those services, this headline sounds a bit odd. That’s because it is.

Let’s do the linguistics first. ‘29% more lies’ is a phrase made up of an adverbial phrase (’29%’), and adjectival/determining phrase (’more’) and a noun phrase (’lies’). The whole phrase is the object of the transitive verb ‘told’. (We’ll ignore ‘on job applications this year than last’ for now.)

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If you are dead, press 1

The National Pandemic Flu Service is due to be launched this week. Essentially it’s a phone line and website which tells people if they have swine flu and, if they do, directs them to treatment.

Apparently having one phone line that you can call to ask questions about your health, as well as a nationwide primary care system, isn’t enough, and we need something else as well. I especially love the indignant tone from the Lib Dems’ health spokesman, Norman Lamb, complaining about the ‘additional burden’ on GPs of ‘a large number of calls’, as if he can’t believe that people are so stupid as to be phoning up their GPs when they feel ill. I mean, next they’ll be onto the police just because they’ve been stabbed.

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Pret makes things out of people

I couldn’t resist that subject line, but there’s a point to it.

The blurred, grainy photo in this post (taken with my slightly ropy phone camera) is of a customer comments card I found this weekend in the Cambridge branch of Pret, the sandwich shop. The card reads:

My name is Marcus. I’m the Manager at this Pret shop.

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Avocados and other unlikely claims

My post on avocados, ethics and supermarket histories appears on the Futures Company blog today.

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) may expect that I’d have something to say on the highly-publicised claim by Global Language Monitor that there are now a million words in the English language. I do - their claim is meaningless - but clearly lexicographers think in packs, because two former colleagues of mine from the OED have already said it perfectly, so I’ll defer to them.

Nobody’s guide to linguistic marketing

I’m looking at the moment for research into the application of linguistics to marketing. Compared to the work on applying neuroscience to marketing (known, imaginatively, as neuromarketing), there doesn’t seem to be much. If you’ve seen any, please let me know.

One I have turned up is:

Zhang, Shi, Bernd H. Schmitt, and Hillary Haley (2003), ‘Language and Culture: Linguistic Effects on Consumer Behavior in International Marketing Research,’ pp. 228-242 in Handbook of Research in International Marketing, ed. S. C. Jain (Edward Elgar Publishing).

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