Language Is Everything
“…language can also corrupt thought.”
- Orwell
This quote could very easily be a part of our Monday Jumpstart series with how well it rings true for those of us who write in the digital space. Friend of the blog and frequent contributor Josh Mortensen uses the quote to open a blog post for his own digital home GlibHippo, a post about language we thoroughly enjoy.
Here is an excerpt:
“Two words never used in advertising or media before the rise on the Web:performance and optimize. Not Ogilvy nor Burnett nor Draper ever uttered them. Apple’s 1984, The Man in the Hathaway Shirt, Clairol’s Does she … or doesn’t she?, VW’s Think Small – none of them had their performance optimized. Brand advertising is about story telling, narrative if you prefer academic sounding jargon, not about tuning.
But in online advertising we have a stunted vocabulary. It is a language devised by engineers who have only a binary understanding of what advertising can or should do. And it is confusing. We use the language of response marketing universally to discuss both tactical and brand. But the two are mutually exclusive. Orwell would recognize this immediately. Language shapes our sense of reality.”
Form is function and language is meaning. Read the rest of Josh’s great blog post here.
