The New Yorker recently featured an article by Jonah Lehrer called “Groupthink,” subtitled “The brainstorming myth.” To some, it will come as no surprise to learn “It doesn’t work.” That’s the pronouncement from academia (Yale, Washington U, Northwestern, Berkeley, Harvard), which has studied the classic good-vibes-only brainstorm technique originated by Alex Osborn, a partner in [...]
Author Archive: Alicia
Appropriated* Word of the Month: Velleity
Ever since I won the weekly Vocabulary Bee four weeks running in fourth grade, I’ve been pretty smug about my conversance with lexical arcana. So, I was impressed when *Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus introduced me to a new and tasty word, velleity: Wishy-Washy Word of the Day: velleity You know all those things that you’ve always [...]
Word of the Season: Tradition (as in: Ramos Gin Fizz)
You can’t swing a dead sprig of mistletoe these days without coming across a witty disquisition on holiday-season language (my favorite so far: see below*, but only after you’ve read mine). Never one to compete with the experts, I am taking, instead, very broad aim at a very broad term: tradition. And then, because nobody [...]
My Mother the Pop Icon
My Mom is hanging in the Museum of Modern Art: the Monica Lane story from publicity glossies to Pop Art.
Spider Season
Seasonality is a big deal in Northern California. We greedily anticipate the first Gravenstein apples, the olive crush, the almond blossoms, the salmon runs, the chanterelles under the oaks. Perhaps because there’s not all that much of a change of seasons around the San Francisco Bay, we fetishize the farmer’s market as our connection to [...]
A Stranglehold on Mindshare, with Compound Interest
Business-speak seems to spawn imaginative metaphorical meanings for compound words. We have turnkey solutions to bandwidth issues and roadmaps to implementing backend gateways; we have sales pipelines and streamlined workflows and software toolkits and downstream upsells. Lately, we have been seeing some compound word metaphors that leave even Content Bureau eggheads with a bit of a headache…
So a Copywriter, a Carpenter, and a Chiropractor Walk Into a Bar…
Is it a stretch to see parallels between shingling a wall and writing copy? You be the judge.
Word of the Season: Gimlet
The summer solstice is upon us, and I am in drippy, humid New York City, visiting family. My nephew’s cologne sits on the bathroom sink, begging to be spritzed. Weekend by Burberry: it smells of cut grass and grapefruit and vodka tonics. Or is it vodka gimlets? I cast a gimlet eye on 21-year-olds feeling [...]
Lundberg Rice: From Flooded Fields to the Chip Aisle
How does the most elemental of foods become the stuff of specialty markets? A thriving California family farm has thoughtfully plotted that course for the past 75 years. “Rice has a very long history of supporting humanity,” says Grant Lundberg, third-generation rice farmer in northern California’s Sacramento Valley and CEO of Lundberg Family Farms. [...]
Waitin’ on the Levee
Everybody who follows the news knows what a “levee” is nowadays, between Hurricane Katrina and the current flooding on the Mississippi, but it was once a prime example of regional language.
