When I was in college, I took an archeology class. Archeology is the study of human beings through the artifacts they leave behind, so when I was assigned a paper on the topic of my choosing, I decided that the “artifacts” I wanted to examine were full-page ads in Life magazine. I’d analyze them to see what they told me about the society that shaped them (or vice versa). I can’t remember the exact date range I focused on, but it was wide enough and far back enough that I got to delve into all sorts of wonderful old ads in the college library, all in the name of archeology. Those were good times.

I still love looking at old ads. They’re such fascinating time capsules. I enjoy seeing bygone products and strange social conventions; plus, I’m captivated by the ads’ art direction, imagery, typography, and copywriting. 

Today, we have the beautiful convenience of the Internet Archive. So let’s look at some of its treasure, shall we?

Now, using Santa and Christmas to hawk cigarettes is nothing new—advertisers did it for many decades. But this particular ad makes me wonder. Why did they go for such a fiendish-looking Santa? He looks ... depraved. Drunk. Sinister. No child of mine would be allowed to sit on this creep’s lap. 

I’m intrigued by Murad’s mysterious tagline, which delivers its social-proof allure in just two words: Everywhere—Why? I believe it’s shorthand for, “These Turkish cigarettes are smoked around the globe. Why do you suppose so?” Answering the “Why?” is really beside the point—Murad’s alleged popularity was the enticement.

As for the quotation marks around the word GREETINGS: Do they mean that Santa is muttering that word through his smirking lips clamped around his Murad? Or are those scare quotes?

Finally, notice that 15¢ price. You won’t be surprised to learn that this ad ran more than a century ago, in 1915. 

Oof. Where to begin? The ludicrous mechanism and straps? The preposterous before-and-after fakery? The aggressive stoking of insecurity? Or the way this huckster shamelessly dubbed himself a “face specialist”?

This 1915 ad features an electric product it calls “Nature’s own remedy for muscle-fatigue and wornout nerves.” I didn’t think that Nature used a plug or batteries, but what do I know?

Nowhere is the price of this product mentioned. We only know that it “[c]osts little and quickly pays for itself in INCREASED PHYSICAL AND MENTAL POWER.” The Monarch Vibrator Company would mail you their product for nothing. Presumably, once you knew the benefits, once you’d learned “the real joy of living,” you wouldn’t be willing to part with it. 

Exhibit D—beer for the whole family:

You know what you don’t see anymore (at least in the US)? Small children in beer ads. You don’t see beer described as “honest” or “wholesome” or “for the whole family,” as in this 1911 ad from Blatz Brewing Company.

You also don’t see hand-lettering like that anymore. Just look at those B’s!

In 1903, to send off for this “absolutely harmless” soap that “never fails to reduce flesh,” you didn’t need a street address. You just mailed your $2.00 to “Norwood Chemical Co., St. James Bldg., N.Y.,” and you’d receive your two cakes (not bars, but cakes!) of La Parle Obesity Soap. If we’re to believe the internet, that price tag would be more than $70.00 in 2024.

Seems preposterous, right? Who would ever fall for such a thing, right? Until you discover that people are still making the same nonsensical claims even  as I type this. 👇 🙄

This is only a small sampling of the advertising delicacies available on the Internet Archive. I suspect I’ll be back with more soon. Stay tuned!

I received this message on LinkedIn yesterday:

I had not written on this topic. I’d never even thought about the relationship between these two words. I couldn’t imagine what contentment had to do with containment.

I was all too familiar with the ubiquitous noun “content.” In fact, I’ve railed against that term. I hate the way it’s used these days to refer to so much writing—including blogs like this one. To me, it just connotes “void-filler,” and it’s an insult.

But how about the adjective content, describing a state of contentedness? What was that all about? I went straight to the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary and got the answer. 

In other words, if what you want falls pretty well within the bounds of what you have, you’re content.

Interesting, right? It immediately made me think of two things.

One was a powerful photography exhibit I saw many years ago at the art museum in Lakeland, Florida. In each photograph, a family was posed in front of their home with all their possessions. The families were from around the world, and I remember the shocking surfeit of stuff* Americans owned compared to their counterparts in other countries. You couldn't help but wonder, as you looked at these photos, what we really need in our lives, and why we’re so driven to acquire more and more things.

By the way, you can get a book of these photographs called Material World: A Global Family Portrait. And the irony is not lost on me that I’ve just invited you to acquire something. (Plus, I used an affiliate link so that I could acquire something myself—0.0004¢ if I’m lucky.)

The second thing I thought of was a scene involving two yachts. I’d read it in the delightful, entertaining, and informative book by Richard Conniff called The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide (another affiliate link). The scene took place at a time when

... Oracle’s stock was soaring and Larry Ellison briefly passed Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to become the world’s second-richest person. Ellison was celebrating aboard his 243-foot yacht off Capri. Then he spotted a 200-foot yacht heading out on a twilight cruise to the village of Positano. It was Paul Allen’s Meduse ... Ellison ordered his captain to crank his yacht’s three engines to full speed. He overtook Allen’s yacht at forty miles an hour, throwing up a huge wake that sent Allen and his guests staggering. “It was an adolescent prank,” Ellison told The Washington Post afterward. “I highly recommend it.”

Don’t recommend it to me, buddy. I think it makes you sound like an insecure, childish fool. I can’t imagine feeling compelled to do such a thing.

​The book is filled with anecdotes like this—of obscenely rich people not merely displaying their wealth, but rubbing others’ noses in it. Conniff explains that such behavior is natural, because we’re mammals who want to achieve and demonstrate dominance.

Yes, I’m a mammal. And I’m not an ascetic, by any means. But I don’t run with the crowd that yachts around the Gulf of Naples. So the “adolescent prank” above just strikes me a bizarre and kind of ... pathetic. It’s the very opposite of contentment. It’s not enough for this guy to be be the second-richest person in the world—he has to literally push his zillionaire adversary around with his huge pleasure craft. I mean: 🙄.

Contentment gets the suspicious side-eye in America, particularly on LinkedIn, land of hustling, humblebragging overachievers. According to all the “boss babes” and “bropreneurs,” you must never stop “crushing it.” You have to “stay hungry,” even if Americans have so many calories available that staying slim has become a $90 billion industry. “Never settle,” we’re commanded. “Manifest that shit.” (A search for that sentence pulls up five thousand results on Etsy.)

I have goals, sure. But when I look at the Venn diagram of my life, I know I’m living very happily inside my “what I have” circle. I love it here. I appreciate it here. I’m content here.

Ohhhhhhh. Now everything began to make sense. (Why did it take me so long to figure this out?)

I decided to go right to the horse’s robotic mouth:

There you have it. AI says that “price-slashin’” is “just a fun and informal way to describe” something.

No, it’s not. It’s weird and awkward and distractingly hokey. It took up a lot of my brain-space today.

So let me say this to Priceline and others of their ilk. Please listen to this living, breathing, HUMAN copywriter. Your brand matters. It is the lifeblood, the heartbeat, the personality of your company. With just a pinch of exaggeration and poetic license I’ll say that it’s the very soul of your company. It’s what makes human beings (read: customers, potential customers, partners, etc.) remember you. Understand you. And ideally, LIKE you. Take care of your brand, for crying out loud!

Penny and the rest of her AI brethren do not care about your brand. The question is, do you?

Recently I gave a CreativeMornings FieldTrip presentation online. I began by asking attendees what words, punctuation, or grammar they struggle with the most. Several people mentioned the semicolon, and one participant wrote this:​

The poor little semicolon! So misunderstood! So unfairly reviled! Even after serving us for so many years as the friendly emoticon wink. ;-)

Please allow me to demystify my friend the semicolon. I want to allay your fears and enable your enjoyment. 

First, forget the word colon and instead think of the semicolon as a period riding around on the shoulders of a comma. It’s kind of like a hybrid of those two punctuation marks, but it has very specific uses. Two, to be exact.

1) It enables two conceptually connected sentences to hold hands.

Sometimes you’ll have two sentences that feel like they belong together. Rather than separating them with a harsh full-stop period, you can let them indulge in a public display of affection by placing a semicolon between them. Like so:

You want to raise Madagascar hissing cockroaches; I want a divorce.

I guess I’m past due for an oil change; my engine appears to have caught fire.

His phone never leaves his hands; I shudder to think of the microbes it hosts.

That “man of God” sure owns a lot of Lamborghinis; I guess he’s answered the age-old question, “What would Jesus drive?”

(Notice that the first letter following the semicolon doesn’t get capitalized unless it’s a proper noun or the word I. You’ve turned two sentences into one.)

​2) It tidies up and clarifies complex lists.

Usually when you punctuate a series of things, commas will easily do the job of separating one thing from the next. Like this:

I notice you’re buying rubber gloves, a ski mask, a gun, and bleach.* Got plans for the weekend?

But sometimes, the items in your series are complex:

• Bacon Level, Alabama
• French Lick, Indiana
• Zzyzx, California

In this case, you could use semicolons to separate the three listed places:

The shell corporation had offices in Bacon Level, Alabama; French Lick, Indiana; and Zzyzx, California.

Those semicolons reduce the chaos and make things easier to read, right?

Another example might be:

The featured speakers at the triplets convention were Huey, Louie, and Dewey Gravelpit; Sandy, Mandy, and Candy Shrinklepie; and Ed, Ned, and Fred Pseudonym.

That’s it! Now you know how to use the semicolon!

To review: You can use a semicolon 1) to bring two sentences together or 2) to keep several complicated phrases apart. Either way, it’s making the world a better place.

Thanks, semicolon; I'm sorry I've been bad-mouthing you for so long.
​
The semicolon never hurt anybody; it only wants to help.

You don’t need a PhD to use a semicolon; it’s here for everybody.

I could keep doing this all day; instead, I’ll let you go forth and punctuate.

A weird thing happened. Two weird things.

On Thursday, I was talking with my friend Vickie. She was struggling to remember the name of the bird pictured above. She said she always has trouble remembering this name, and she began to describe the bird.

“MAGPIE!” I blurted out. “I always have trouble remembering that name, too! It’s on my list called ‘Words I can never remember.’”

That was the first weird thing: magpie eludes both Vickie and me.

Then tonight, my husband and I were struggling to remember the word that describes large-spotted animals like paint horses and our dog Freddy, shown here. I had to lean on ChatGPT to remind me. The word is piebald.

“Is that her with the ponytail?” asked Karen.

“That might be her,” said Chris.

Welcome to Do You Need a Ride?, one of my favorite podcasts, hosted by comedians Karen Kilgariff and Chris Fairbanks. The show’s schtick is that Karen and Chris provide a sort of taxi service for their comedian friends, driving them to or from the airport or other places and engaging in hilarious conversation in the car.

The snippet of dialogue above happened when Karen and Chris were picking up comedian Sara Schaefer. And technically, both Karen and Chris made a mistake. If they wanted to be grammatically proper, they would have said:

“Is that she with the ponytail?”

“That might be she.”

Record-scratch. Yuckola! That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Snooty. Antiquated. Ridiculous.

Here’s why it’s (again, technically) correct, though. In English, the pronoun she serves as a subject, while the pronoun her serves as an object.

She published her manifesto. (She is the subject.)

The FBI called her in for questioning. (Her is the object.)

She wore her mink overalls to the Oscars. (She is the subject.)
​
PETA has been giving her a lot of unwelcome attention. (Her is an object.)

The sentences spoken by Karen and Chris include what’s called a linking verb, which works like an equal sign in an equation:

She is a ventriloquist.

He is a scoundrel.

You are a nightmare.

We are taxidermists.
​
They are flat-earthers.

Similarly, Karen and Chris were essentially expressing this equation:

that (person) = Sara Schaefer

If we reduce that equation properly we get:

that = Sara
        ⬇
that = she
        ⬇
That is she.

The sentence is simply stating [Subject] equals [something]. There’s no object, so there’s no need for the object pronoun her. The correct pronoun is she.

Similarly, back in the days when we would actually answer telephones, if a caller asked for us by name, we might respond, “This is she” or “This is he.” Pompous, but proper.

But some rules just need to be broken, and Karen and Chris did exactly what they should have done. They threw the pretentious That is she construction out the car window and went with the perfectly acceptable (preferable, really​) That is her approach instead.

And you can too. As with all speaking and writing, you should consider your audience, your circumstances, the medium, and the mood. You can always break the rules in English, but it’s good to know you’re breaking them.

I suppose I can see the appeal of collecting insects—organizing them, labeling them, pinning them to boards. But I far prefer my own collection: words.

I've written about them before, sharing some noteworthy "bad" words and grody words. But today I want to share my growing list entitled "words I'd like to use." See, when I read good writing, I'll often stop and think, "Why don't I ever use that word? It's a terrific word!" And I add it to the list. 

Behold! Here is my treasured assemblage of fabulous words that I hope to pull out of mothballs more often so I can delight in them.

acolyte
admonish, admonition, admonishment
anguish
capitulate
captivate
castigate
cataclysm
clandestine
condemn, condemnation
consecrate
contempt
corrosive
craven
debase
debauchery
defamatory
deferential
degenerate
degrading, degradation
dejected
denounce, denunciation
depravity
desecrate
devoted
diminish
enumerate
exculpatory
execrable
forbearance
gormless
habituate
imperative
incendiary
indignity
iniquity, iniquitous
irascible
judicious
impediment
inscrutable
inveigle
insubordinate
lament, lamentation
manifold
obstinate 
obstreperous
oracle
paradox
pernicious
plutocrat
polarize, polarizing
polemic
postulate
potentate
predatory, predation
predilection
premonition
preternatural
profane
propitious
rebuke
recalcitrant
recriminations
remonstrate
reprobate
resolute
reticent
rhapsodize
rhetoric
sensibility
sorcery
spasmodic
speculate
subordinate
tacit
treachery
vacuous
venerated
vitriolic
vituperative
voluptuary

Now, butterfly collectors get to call themselves lepidopterists. But I'm not really wild about that word—it reminds me of chiropodist. I far prefer logophile. I like it so much, in fact, that I turned it into a shirt that you might say fits me to a tee.

I read this aphorism all the time, and I hate it.

First of all, it’s patently untrue. Of course there is “try.” That’s why we have the word, Yoda. We even have an abundance of synonyms for it: attempt, endeavor, take a stab at, etc. Don’t tell me there is no try. I try all the time. Don’t invalidate my efforts, you 26-inch puppet, you.

Also, trying and doing/not doing are not mutually exclusive. I could try to make a chocolate soufflé and end up with a tall, fluffy masterpiece; I could try to make that same soufflé and end up with an odd mutant dessert omelet. Either way, I have tried.

The Yoda meme, beyond being false, encourages terrible black-and-white thinking. You know, like: You’re either with me or against me. It says that if you don’t succeed, you fail—and that those are your only two choices.

Ugh. What terrible nonsense.

Trying is where the best things happen. If your chocolate soufflé doesn’t rise, you might learn the benefit of adding cream of tartar or using a copper bowl to whip your egg whites. Or you might create a delicious new protein-packed breakfast treat. You might simply enjoy some leisure time in the kitchen.

When you try, you demonstrate to yourself that you’re capable of trying, of taking risks, of experimenting and adjusting your path forward. You discover what works and what doesn’t. You learn. You grow. You get better.

But people just love that stupid Yoda line because it sounds so absolute and hard-core. They claim that if you so much as contemplate the tiny word “try,” you are swinging open the door for failure to rush in and ruin everything. They believe that you must possess complete conviction or you will surely sabotage yourself.

Balderdash! You can acknowledge risks and still succeed. In fact, that’s often the wisest way to go. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I often ask myself when something feels intimidating. And if I answer myself honestly, I can see that “the worst” isn’t nearly so objectionable as inaction and the potential regret of what might have been. So I try, and quite a lot of the time, I “do.”

Think twice before believing Yoda’s terrible pronouncement. The full-blown, deaf-to-distraction, self-delusional certitude that he advocates gets people into an awful lot of trouble. I’m thinking of Elizabeth Holmes. I’m thinking of The Secret. I’m thinking of countless cults. Just because you really, really, really, really want something to happen does not—can not—not make it so.

Will this little rant on my little blog stop the legions of people who continue to share this horrible quote and use it to guide their lives? Nope. Can I make a few people think twice about doing so? Maybe.

I can surely try.

This ridiculous ad 👆 just popped up while I was working on the job I’m now procrastinating.

I saw those awful overblown smiles in that preposterously contrived pose, and I was reminded of my mother.

Not because she made those freaky fake facial expressions. (She did not.) No, it was because of a onetime experience we had together. 

I was a teenager, and my mother and I were in a mall together in Oklahoma City, walking around, looking at this and that. We stopped in front of a jewelry store where an enormous photograph featured a woman radiating the ecstatic delight that only a diamond can deliver.

Like in the photo above, this model had her mouth wide open, showing the world her irrepressible glee and her years of orthodontia. My mother and I could see that the situation demanded derision.

So we approached the picture and marveled at the outsized absurdity together. And that’s when we saw it. A line of saliva stretching between the model’s upper and lower teeth. Because the photo was so huge, so was this string of spit. Probably not quite the size of a baseball bat, but it may as well have been.

The laughter that ensued was truly maniacal. Physically taxing. Possibly dangerous. You know what I’m talking about—wheezing, crying, clutching our stomachs.

No mortgage, no diamond, no product or service can deliver the raw, wild, fabulous joy that my mother and I experienced on that day—or the memory that remains with me all these years later.

Thanks for letting me share. Time for me to get back to work.

I spend a whole lot of time on LinkedIn. It’s the place where I can procrastinate by building my business and vice versa. It’s a win-win, whenever I want.

Initially, I was careful to follow the conventional wisdom of only connecting with people on LinkedIn I knew in real life. But I quickly realized that such “wisdom” is poppycock, and you have much more to gain by consenting to connections somewhat indiscriminately—at least if you post daily, like I do. More connections means more eyeballs means more people understanding what I have to offer. Thus far, I have not been lured into a cult or lost all my savings to an overseas prince—or whatever the purported risks are of being like me—a self-proclaimed LinkedIn slut.

Anyway, every now and then, I receive messages from new LinkedIn connections that begin with some form of the question, “How are you?”

In real life, I know that such a question can be something of a throwaway line. You might walk past Dolores from accounting, smile, nod, and say, “How’s it going?” You don't really expect Dolores to answer. You two know one another, so it’s appropriate to sling and accept such niceties. Questions like “How ya doin’” are understood to be merely phatic. (👈 Great word alert!)

But when a complete stranger on LinkedIn asks me how I am, it feels both preposterous and off-putting. It’s like they’ve just asked me when I lost my virginity or had my last bowel movement. All I can think is, “Why on earth are you asking me that, and why would I ever answer you?”

Then part of me fantasizes about answering their question with the singleminded goal of rendering them speechless. I could say something like:

“So glad you asked! Are you familiar with scurvy? And scabies? And gingivitis? I have those. Plus two flat tires and a warrant for my arrest. On the plus side, a DNA test has revealed that I’m two-thirds Australian cattle dog, so I’ve filed for dual citizenship. Oh, and I’ve discovered an amazing opportunity I’d love to tell you about, and all I need is $999.99 for your first information session. No time like the present, I always say—would you rather use a credit card or PayPal?”

Alas, I never do this. Out of a mixture of self-preservation, laziness, and probably a soupçon of hostility, I simply never respond. I ghost them. So I will call this my ghost story, and with it, I will wish you a Happy Halloween—whether I know you or not.