June 18, 2024

Words have feelings

It helps if you know what you’re talking about.

Shame is a great teacher. If you want a stomach-churning aversion to making the same mistake twice, give yourself a chastening experience.

I once, and never again thereafter, made the mistake of using a word that I didn’t understand in a professional setting. To make matters worse, I was on my feet at the time in front of an audience. And not just any audience. It was our first presentation to the new marketing director of an important client. ‘Come down and talk him through the work you’ve been doing for us.’ So it was a high-stakes meeting, in which the objective was to impress. The VIP also happened to be a no-nonsense Aussie with a keen nose for bullshit.

It was going well until I said something about creating advertising to increase the salience of the brand. The VIP stopped me and said, ‘Phil, can you explain what you mean by ‘salience’ please?’

And of course I couldn’t. Not convincingly. The fact that I had to think about it was bad enough. I flunked the test. I’d used an impressive-sounding word in an attempt to impress, and it had backfired spectacularly. The whole point of the meeting was to build credibility from a zero balance, instead of which I’d created an overdraft.

My gut still clenches when I remember this episode. It triggers a visceral reflex response nearly three decades later.

I vowed on the spot to never again use a word without fully understanding its meaning. In fact I’ve probably been overcompensating ever since. It was mortifying but it was also the start of my obsession with communicating from first principles, and the start of my nerdy love affair with etymology, both of which have served me well over the years.

The point of salience.

Salience is from the Latin verb, salire, meaning ‘to leap’. The present participle of salire is saliens, which means ‘leaping’.

A salient brand is one that leaps out at you. And that’s why it shares its first three letters with ‘salmon’.

Salience is a hard-nosed commercial concept. If I ask you to think of an airline, you might say British Airways. But if I ask you to think of a cheap way to get to Spain, you’re more likely to come back with Ryanair. British Airways might be famous, but Ryanair is first in line on a particular buying occasion. Ryanair jumps out at you when you have a particular job to be done. That’s salience. If only I’d known then what I know now.

Etymology is radical thinking.

My interest in etymology started as a professional self-preservation tactic. It was a defensive measure. But, over time, it became an important craft skill. Understanding the deep meaning of a word has often changed my approach to the work.

Radical comes from radix, the Latin word for ‘root’. So getting to the root of things is literally a radical act.

Take the word ‘customer’, which we all take for granted.

Then take the Latin word, custumarius, which means toll gatherer or tax collector. At its root, ‘customer’ is a transactional word arising from an extractive exchange. It speaks of high-volume, low-involvement interactions.

Many organisations that describe themselves as customer-centric present themselves as anything but. Maybe that’s because they’re thinking radically. They’re thinking like toll gatherers and optimising for the efficient extraction of value, rather than the utility or pleasure of the exchange in the other person’s shoes.

Contrast all that with the word ‘client’. There’s some Latin in its etymology too, relating to the concepts of follower and retainer. But there’s also a Proto Indo European notion of ‘one who leans on another for protection’. So the concept of ‘client’ is saturated with all the intimacy, humanity, and duty of care that is conspicuously absent from the root meaning of ‘customer’.

Knowing these things makes me think differently. I’m less likely to use these words interchangeably. And every service business should treat its customers like clients.

Words have feelings.

The contrast between customer and client shows that words have feelings. Words carry weight. These feelings are innate. Etymology is the study of verbal DNA. And having a feel for a word, for its ancestry, affects your thinking more deeply than a surface understanding.

‘Aesthetic’ is from the Greek aisthetikos, which means ‘perception by the senses’. Most often we treat aesthetics as the way something looks. But, at its root, it’s a more rich, textured, and multi-dimensional concept. It describes our full sensual perception of a thing.

Architects are radical thinkers when it comes to aesthetics.

The image above is a section of the interior of the V&A Museum in Dundee. The Japanese architect behind the design (Kengo Kuma) was inspired by the concept of komorebi, ‘the dappled light through the leaves of trees in a forest in the morning or late afternoon.’ Hence the small windows. The planks are human-sized so that although the interior is vast, it doesn’t intimidate - just like a forest.

It’s a great example of an aesthetic as a blueprint for a desired sensual experience. It’s not an abstract idea. It’s beautiful, visionary, and poetic for sure. But it’s also a pragmatic design brief.

If you ponder the deep meaning of a word, if you sense its heft, it better equips you to work with it.

Every message is garbled.

Exploring the etymology of words has become second nature. It’s a useful habit that often rewards the whimsy behind the enquiry.

For a recent project I was thinking about how messages lose fidelity between sender and recipient. And I got to pondering the idea of garbled messages. And isn’t a word like ‘garbled’ just sitting up and begging you to dig into its root meaning?

You find the Arabic words gharbal (to sift) and kirbal (sieve). And you find the Italian word garbellare (to sift grain). At its root, garbling is sifting.

Previously when I thought of a garbled message, I imagined the garbling happening somewhere in the middle of the transmission. There’d be some kind of interference or a loss of signal in the middle.

But when I think of garbling as sifting, that happens not in the middle but at the receiving end. The recipient sifts meaning from the message on the basis of how much attention they’re paying, their preconceptions, their values, and their worldview. This kind of sifting, this kind of garbling, is inevitable. Every message is garbled by its recipient.

So there’s no such thing as garble-proof messaging. But if you accept that sifting is a given, you can work to make your messaging garble-resistant.

In this case, my etymological whimsy turned out to be a useful tangent. It made the deliverables better.

Managing meaning.

Brand strategy is the art of managing meaning. So I’d argue that every brand strategist should be an avid student of meaning in all its forms. You don’t have to be an etymology nerd to do this work, but it helps.

We can be quite ¹glib in our use of professional language. I was caught out being glib with ‘salience’. It can be dangerous. So minding your language keeps you out of bother. But there’s also a creative upside to rooting around in the etymological guts of a word.

It really does help if you know what you’re talking about.

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This article is an adaptation of a presentation I gave to the design team at FreeAgent recently, entitled Think of What You’re Saying. Thank you to them for the invitation.

1. From the Low German word glibberig, meaning ‘smooth’ or ‘slippery’.