I like coffee because it gives me the illusion that I might be awake. —Lewis Black
Either the coffee is right or everything is wrong
Competition is everywhere. We compete for time, we compete for attention, we even compete with ourselves when it comes to matters such as losing weight or going to the gym. We understand competition both from a personal and commercial perspective and we typically don’t think too much of one product throwing a little shade at their competition. We rather expect that. After all, they have to compete for our attention before they can compete for our dollars.
Coffee is a competitive business, to be sure, but at the same time, it is one of the things that unites a lot of people. Meeting over coffee is one of my preferred ways of getting together with people. How people drink their coffee, or whether they drink coffee, tells me a little bit about them.
Where we don’t necessarily expect competition, though, is among dictionaries. Certainly, it has always existed, with each claiming to be either the most precise or the most complete. The dictionary business has changed dramatically, though, as the Internet has developed. People are buying fewer dictionaries than ever before, and major search engines now provide the definition of a word simply by typing it in, so we don’t even need to visit a dictionary’s website. Spell check doesn’t help the dictionary business, either, though that function isn’t always reliable.
I’ve just given you three very different and distinct topics within three paragraphs, loosely tied around the concept of competition. Yet, what brings all these together this morning, and the only reason I’m writing about them in the first place, is the shade one dictionary threw at another over coffee, which thereby highlights just how competitive the word business can be.
The whole thing started when the top-ranking dictionary.com posted this tweet:
— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) April 11, 2016
Seems a rather appropriate tweet given this is National Library Week, doesn’t it? A gentle hint at how our word choice carries basic emotions. But look carefully at the picture. Do you see the problem? The folks at Merriam-Webster, you know, that more traditional dictionary that folks my age used all through school, caught the error and were quick with a comeback.
.@Dictionarycom There’s no cream in that coffee.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) April 11, 2016
Oops! Major shade thrown. By a dictionary.
If ever there were an example of needing to not only double check but triple check one’s work, this is it. Even in the dictionary business,where competition tends to be more elevated and subtle, if one makes an obvious error in public be sure that the competition is going to pounce on the opportunity to take advantage of your mistake, even if it’s one most people probably didn’t even notice the first time around.
And most people didn’t notice. No one had said a thing about the fact that the coffee in the picture didn’t have any visible signs of being creamed until Merriam-Webster brought it to our attention. Most people tend to skim their Twitter feeds anyway and we actually pay attention to less than ten percent of what we see there. Had the competition not been watching, chances are that even if someone caught the error they likely wouldn’t say anything. After all, who wants to take on people who work for a dictionary? For most mortals, such a challenge could end badly.
The other lesson to be learned here is that pictures have meanings and definitions just as much as words do. One can’t just take a random picture and slap it with a set of words that have no relation, or worse yet, contradict the image. You’ll notice that in the picture we used here the coffee does have cream. Uhm, you did notice that she’s holding coffee, didn’t you? Maybe I’m expecting too much of some, but I’m sure one or two people caught on without having to scroll back up and check. My point is, though, that matching the right picture with the right words can be quite challenging. It took over an hour of wading through the archives before we found a coffee picture that actually had cream in it. Imagine what the challenge would be like for someone who didn’t have such a collection at their fingertips. Finding the right picture can be every bit as challenging, and every bit as important, as finding the right words.
Which brings me to my final point: this is what happens when marketing departments use stock photos rather than buying original imagery. Dictionary.com was slammed because someone in the marketing department, possibly an intern, was instructed to pair a stock image with a literary quote [we’ll just assume that dictionary.com has permission to use the image and didn’t steal it from the Internet]. Business is too competitive to be risking your image with stock photography, especially when the photo doesn’t match the message.
In the end, this isn’t a huge, earth-shattering or career-ending faux pax. I doubt anyone lost their job and this isn’t the type of thing that is going to sway anyone’s opinion about which online dictionary to use. There are lessons to be learned from the situation, though; lessons we all should remember so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.
And we all could probably do with another cup of coffee.
When you see a dog wearing the same outfit as you and the dog wears it better.
When there’s no Pantone® number to match anything you’re wearing.
When people follow you because they’re sure you must be on your way to a circus. 
When you’re wearing fishnet and the park ranger gives you a ticket for carrying over the limit. 
When the tags in all your clothes say “Made In Bangladesh.” 
Time To Ditch The Cruelty
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity. —George Eliot
We need more smiles. We need more niceness. We need less cruelty.
I started yesterday in one of those foul moods where I’m pretty sure my verbal cruelty had Kat more than happy to be spending the day at the salon. I hate those days, but yesterday rather snuck up on me as a confluence of circumstance combined with continual interference from an unwanted external source made the situation intolerable. While I would like to excuse the behavior as just being human, I can’t. I know better. I caved to those basest and vile instincts that might have had their place some 40,000 years ago but are wholly inappropriate now.
Sadder still, I’m far from being the only one who has had issues with cruelty of late. We have come to expect cruelty in a presidential election year, I suppose, but that still doesn’t make the comments against women, minorities, immigrants, or other candidates’ family members any more appropriate. One of the first things I saw in my newsfeed this morning was a click-bait article (I’ll not bother you with the link) recounting the 17 worst assassination attempts on President Obama. And the whole still-developing mess from the Panama Papers threatens to unleash a whole new wave of international outrage toward anyone whose offshore dealings come off as shady. Given the current inference of bad guys mixing with heads of state, one might expect the next couple of weeks to be a bit tense at best.
I worry that cruelty has become our second nature. Someone says something we don’t like, we want to punch them. Someone represents something we oppose, we want to redistribute their body parts. Someone cuts us off in traffic, we’re immediately homicidal. We don’t want to take time to talk and understand each other’s point of view, we don’t want to take into consideration a different perspective. We don’t want to negotiate a peaceful outcome. We want full and complete destruction and will go to whatever means necessary to satisfy our blood lust.
This is the world we have created. We cannot blame our bent toward cruelty on previous generations. We did not learn this through bad parenting. We did not get here by failing to get the right trophy when we were in grade school. This is the result of a conscious and deliberate decision to not stop ourselves at that first moment of anger or disappointment. We could have just as easily shut ourselves down and done the right thing, but we decided, both collectively and individually, to let the anger push us forward.
As a result, we no longer even notice when five are killed in Pittsburg, or Kansas City, or Glendale. When an Uber driver goes nuts and kills six in Kalamazoo, we’re momentarily upset because children were involved, but then we go right back to exactly the same things we were doing the moment before. We’ve resigned ourselves to the notion that this is just the way things are and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
I call bullshit.
I can do something about my attitude and my response to everything that happens to and around me. How I respond, in turn, effects how others around me respond and their response impacts others beyond my reach. Every last one of us can improve the world simply by changing our own response and not letting anger and cruelty take over. We are in control and just as my grousing and cursing made yesterday difficult for everyone, I can just as easily make this morning better by saying thank you, speaking softly, and maybe even hand delivering a kiss or two where appropriate.
You can do the same. I know you can. You can smile, even though the weather this morning leaves something to be desired. You can choose a quiet, positive-toned response when someone approaches you with unjustified anger. You can stick up for someone who’s being treated unfairly. You can earnestly try to understand someone else’s point of view, even though you disagree with their position on the matter. You can step back, count to ten, or maybe even walk away from a situation rather than losing your temper.
We can all do a lot to change this pattern of cruelty that we’ve allowed to permeate our society. After all, we were the ones who let the situation get out of control in the first place. Politicians don’t make America or anywhere else great, people do. Let this be your #MondayMotivation to start making the world more friendly. We can do it.
Share this:
Like this: