Observed

A tech novelties article caught my eye the other day.  I found Anne Eisenberg’s coverage of on-line dictionaries (think Worknik) fascinating for how it reminded me of the humanness of language.

(It also hit me that the editors of The New York Times placed an article about words on the Business page.  Yeah, I know, it was really a tech piece.  It also underscored — in my mind, at least — the importance of good writing to good business.  Just saying.)

I noticed the tension between Web purists like Wordnik’s founder, Erin McKean, and Old Schoolers who admonish writers not to lean too far into the Internet.

Example?  Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, likes Wordnik’s oceans of words and word associations.  On the other hand, Nunberg says,

“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy.

“Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”

Then again, Wordnik (launched in June 2009) has raised almost $13 million in VC so far and has business partners on the hook.  Somebody’s leaning.

New York Times auto writer Lawrence Ulrich sights a Buddhist monastery and sees a connection to how the new BMW 6 Series handles on the winding ocean-side roads of Northern California. Does this willingness to take chances with storytelling suggest anything for the way we handle marketing content for professional service providers?

So, OK, I’ll admit that a journalist covering the auto industry isn’t exactly analogous to someone writing for business readers.  The keyword here, however, is exactly.

Because Lawrence Ulrich has something to offer those of us who order, create and approve content for law firm Web sites, client brochures and such.  As auto writer/critic for The New York Times, Mr. Ulrich takes a technical subject that’s part of everyday life and makes it come alive.

Decide for yourself.  See, for example, whether the wit and intelligence in this piece about BMW’s new 6 Series doesn’t suggest how your looks-and-sounds-the-same-as-everybody-else’s content might acquire some zing and become more engaging.

I could go on and on.  Of all of the things I like about this article, here’s a passage that made me laugh out loud:

With both of those optional onboard systems, along with chunky 20-inch wheels and tires, the 650i felt unflappable along Route 301 near Carmel — almost an affront to the nearby Chuang Yen Monastery, whose Buddhist monks might take one look at the lavish BMW and advise, “Peace comes from within, do not seek it without.”

Yes?

The smart ones -- such as Daniel Boone -- may have kept going west...to Kentucky and beyond. But the tough ones stayed in the mountains. Like the ones who founded Lincoln Memorial University in 1897. Now, the American Bar Association is about to find out just how tough they are down in Harrogate, Tenn.

If you’ve ever been to the lands of the Cumberland Gap, you know or have a pretty good idea that nothing has ever come easy in these parts.  Not roads.  Not coal mining.  Not jobs.  And, if you’ve been following the recent news about Lincoln Memorial University, not accredited law schools.

The tale of LMU’s so-far-thwarted efforts to create an accredited law school says a lot about the state of how and where lawyers are educated in the United States.  It tells us, for example, how the American Bar Association wears the protector’s mantle.

It tells us how the ABA ostensibly uses the law school accreditation process to safeguard the profession’s standards and to protect the public from quacks, charlatans and shysters.

On the other hand, something has to give.  There’s a growing awareness that whatever system we have isn’t working.   That the status quo…

• Unrealistically burdens students with crushing debt
• Often results in graduates with law degrees who lack the basic skills to practice law, and
• Restricts access to basic legal services in some parts of the nation and populations

This last one includes, the promoters of LMU’s Duncan School of Law claim, the people of the Appalachians where Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia meet.

This is despite — or, perhaps, because of — the existence of 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the 50 states.  These include three in Kentucky alone.

Which suggests another issue altogether.  Does a state such as Kentucky really need three large law schools?  If not, is there any chance that my state’s leaders could ever find whatever it takes to unring that bell?

I doubt it.  However, Sydney Beckman, Pete DeBusk and other champions of an accredited Duncan School of Law are headed for their day in court.  Where we’ll see, as my people sometimes say, whether this dog will hunt.

Even though it’s Christmas Eve, there’s no need to get all Trinitarian on you.

Nevertheless, I’ve found the third member of my Holy Trinity of writers at The New York Times, my principal source of news and of seemingly never-ending writers delight. Before I confess my crush on essayist-critic Ginia Bellafante, let me tell you about the other two.

A part of me wants to be Bill Cunningham when I grow up.  I mean, wouldn’t you like to spend your days riding around Manhattan on your bicycle or attending swanky parties, taking pictures of the beautiful people and writing all of it up once a week or so?  Then again, I’ve seen the bio-mentary of Mr. Cunningham.  Which is when another part of me kicks in…the part that isn’t fond of the idea of spending most of my adult life alone, riding my bicycle around Manhattan taking picture of the beautiful people.

While it’s a close call, Gail Collins gets the nod over Maureen Dowd.  Both write like dreams, can snark with the best of them, and lean way far to the left.  Ms. Collins, however, hails from just up the river from me, in Cincinnati, and got her start as a reporter in Northern Kentucky.  Maybe she represents the hope that I might actually amount to something…someday.

Ginia Bellafante

I could (and do) read Frank Rich, Frank Bruni, Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristol, Roger Cohen, Matt Bai and other NYT writers just about every day.  Yet, there’s just something about Ginia Bellafante that I simply adore.  Maybe it’s her beat — New York City — which showed up about three months ago in a column entitled Big City.    In it and elsewhere, Ms. Bellafante shows that she has the perfect eye and ear for a Gotham where Gatsby meets Bonfire.

Maybe it’s her pen.  Which often reminds me of Hunter Thompson’s weird and wild rantings…without the Bourbon and mushrooms.  To wit, a paragraph from her Dec. 16, 2011, piece about the wedding of Jacqueline Schmidt and David Friedlander, a pair of mid-30s New Yorkers who wanted their union to be “about the world of creativity and social purpose that they inhabit.”  The venue was the PowerHouse Arena, “a loft-like store for arty bibliophiles” in the city’s Dumbo district.

Ms. Schmidt, who once served as the creative director of Moomah, the children’s cafe in Tribeca that caters to parents in denial about some of the distasteful aesthetics of child-rearing, made the cards in her favored style of heavy stock, neutral paper and quaint typefaces. Through her company, Screech Owl Design, Ms. Schmidt makes beautiful, twee paper products that would seem to demand an existence inside a Miranda July snow globe. Synergistically, PowerHouse is among the many places where Ms. Schmidt’s work is sold.

See what it mean?

Newt Gingrich's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination seems undeterred by his campaign to sell his books. He and wife Calista often drive their handlers crazy by spending time signing books instead of stumping for votes. Or, are those the same things?

Doesn’t it make perfect sense that 2011 holiday book sales are strong…despite the growing popularity of electronic reading; or, perhaps, because of it?  Or, despite the loss of bankrupt Borders’s 650 stores from the retail mix?

Books — real books — are tangible.  All the better to put under the Christmas tree or hand to someone special as a gift.

And, to show that you care. Really care.

Retailers and publishers report, by the way, that sales of non-fiction titles are the strongest sector in their industry.  In addition, big, expensive books seem to be a niche unaffected by the recession or worries about online competition.

Dave Barry takes his readers on a little journey through the cornfields and bureaucracies of Indiana, where the citizens of Dana are battling to honor the life of one of their native sons, Ernie Pyle. It's too bad that so few of us recognize that name -- or the name of his gifted contemporary from Paducah, Ky., Irvin S. Cobb -- much less have read anything they wrote. That's our loss.

Do yourself a favor.  If you want to see how it’s done, check out Dave Barry’s solid little story about legendary WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle and Dana, Ind., the hometown town struggling to keep Mr. Pyle’s memory alive.

Consider, for example:

Dana is learning the familiar lesson that the famous are not forever so; names slip from collective memory, to be replaced by other names also destined for the tip of our tongues, and then gone. Who remembers, say, Wheeler and Woolsey, the wacky comedy team of the 1930s; or Irvin S. Cobb, a cigar-chomping humorist as well known as Will Rogers in his day; or the Dionne quintuplets, international sensations.

But Ernie Pyle was not just famous; he mattered.

Not too much.  Not too little.  Mr. Barry sinks his hook in the first sentence and keeps you caring about the Hoosiers with the big hearts…all the way to the end.

He gets out of the way.  No dazzling distractions.  No lofty arguments or self-important bloviations.

Just good, solid writing, worthy of Mr. Barry’s subject.

Praesent in multis potuit paucis? (Or...Why use a few words when many could do?) I wonder how much lawyers' love of Latin has to do with the hunger for academic respect that influences so much of their law school training. Or, with the powder-wigged, Boswellian affectations that characterize the case law they studied?

Take a peek behind the curtain of law school training in today’s New York Times.   In it, reporter David Segal outlines the failure of legal education in the U.S. to prepare lawyers to practically earn their keep.

The piece made me think about what might inspire the florid written wordiness I so often see from lawyers, even in non-legal business development content.  Could it have something to do with the obsession of law school professors to be taken seriously in academe?  Or, with the hidebound, 18th and 19th-century (and earlier) case law that still comprises so much of what law students pack into their brains?

Is the use of Latin, hallowed despite its death (or, perhaps, because of it), another way of compensating for the profession’s inferred inferiority.  Is Latin a way for lawyers to prove they they deserve to be taken as seriously and respected as much as, say, physicians or clergy?

Mr. Segal reports that the winds of reform are gathering, offering hope that law student loans and other wrongs will be blown away.  Maybe these fresh breezes will arrive with copies of Strunk and White.

Some people mean more together than they do apart, whatever the stage. Churchill and Hitler. Bogart and Bacall. Ali and Frazier.

Writers want to engage, not distract their readers. Dave Anderson may have done the latter with his use of a much-hated name to make a point in his article about champion boxer Joe Frazier.

This is the lead in Dave Anderson’s farewell to Joe Frazier, the heavyweight boxer and former champ who died of cancer Monday night.

Did you notice the name in the second sentence?  Did you react the way I did?  With puzzlement?  Wondering why Mr. Anderson reached for such an inflammatory name to engage his readers and make a point about synergy?

Instead of being engaged, the analogy distracted me.  If I had been looking for a third pair for that match, I would have kept my distance from naming mass murderers.

But, hey.  Maybe that’s just me.

Holly Brubach. Period.

“With no closing time — and no drinks (B.Y.O.B!) — the site hosts selected fashion photos, ad campaigns, music videos, commercials and documentaries spanning the past three decades of Weber’s career alongside paintings from a show by the artist Jeremy Everett (a friend of Weber’s), an appreciation of Simone de Beauvoir’s book about Brigitte Bardot and high praise for Danny DiMauro, a barber in  Montauk, N.Y.”

– Holly Brubach, temporarily forgetting the concept of the period in a 64-word sentence.  Ms. Brubach was writing recently in The New York Times about fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s new Web site.

Maybe it's never taken much to launch a concept. But snarky comments about interior decorating? A random post from The Unhappy Hipster reads, "The door, pushed to depression by neglect and an unwarranted preference for plush, sadly inched closer to the end of his track." Really?

I read a piece about The Unhappy Hipster blog in yesterday’s New York Times and got the sense that the story of the two funny, smart and talented women behind it unfolded over years.

Then, I went back to the top of the article. “It was early in 2010.” In other words, the whole damn thing BEGAN about a year, year and a half ago, right?  From boredom to blog to book to gray eminence in 12 months or so.

Maybe it’s my Boomer DNA. I tell myself, Things take time.

Not anymore. Things don’t take anything. Molly Jane Quinn, Jenna Talbott and their followers have proven it, yes?