Category: Words
How to apologize – corporate edition
We’ve read a lot lately about the value of swift, full, and forthright apologies when public figures screw up. What about companies that screw up?
Blippy is a website that lets users trade updates about their consumer purchases. Recently, an obscure programming error, compounded by mistakes at Google and one small midwestern bank, allowed Google to index the credit card numbers of four or five Blippy customers, potentially exposing these numbers to people browsing the web. Co-founder & CEO Ashvin Kumar’s apology to users could serve as a model for companies that find themselves in a similar pickle. Moneyquote:
It has been a rocky weekend for Blippy. The weekend began with a front page article in the New York Times announcing our Series A financing. The elation didn’t last long. A few hours later, reports surfaced about the discovery of credit card numbers within Google’s cached search results. Our mood quickly went from elation to disbelief to disappointment. We are very sorry.
However, this is a very serious issue and simply apologizing is not enough. We’ve spent the last 48 hours working around the clock to dissect the issues, reach out to affected users, and put together a plan to ensure this never happens again.
There followed a detailed, plainspoken, 1000-word explanation of exactly what went wrong, and the steps Blippy and Google took to fix the problem. The explanation is admirably devoid of weasel words or any attempt at evading responsibility. It neither grovels nor glosses over. By treating customers with respect, it inspires reciprocal respect for the company at an awkward time.
Customers do not expect perfect products and perfect service. Their loyalty (or hostility) to a brand arises in large measure from the way a company responds to problems that inevitably arise. A willingness to listen to customers, an ethic of candor in dealings with them, and an honest determination to put things right—companies that get those three things right will enjoy excellent customer relations.
That Google whiz – more feedback
Contrarian reader M. Austin writes:
Your reporting on Go Ogle taking the pi** out of some has brought to my attention the fact that whiz is spelled with an h. This realisation has me looking at Velveeta’s jarred cousin with suspicion.
Oops! – II (updated)
Contrarian reader Dave Atkinson writes:
Both you and Bill Turpin used the word “fulsomely” to describe an apology. I assume you both know what you’re doing.
How droll. Bill and I probably knew once, but we, or at least I, forgot. William Safire rises from the dead to remind us. (As a bonus, he throws in “noisome” and “enormity.”)
[Update] Bill T. didn’t forget after all:
Sheesh! I’ve been lectured by Harry Flemming on the use of fulsome, so I chose it with care to describe The Coast’s apology, and did so because of its ambiguity. It’s nice that Dave Atkinson picked up on it, but I think Parker was too quick with the strikethrough.
As for me, I chose it carelessly, and I’m with Safire on this: Claiming that “fulsome” can also mean “full-bodied” (or whatever), because people use it when they mean to say “full-bodied,” strikes me as descriptivist lexicography run amok.
Literary fire hazard
The Halifax Fire Marshall temporarily halted a reading by Alistair MacLeod (standing, back to camera, left side of photo) tonight so the overflow crowd of more than 600 could be rearranged to clear clogged aisles. Officials turned away another 100 people as the 73-year-old MacLeod, who splits his time between Windsor, Ontario, and Dunvegan, Cape Breton, read his 1976 story, The Closing Down of Summer. The Saint Mary’s University event marked the first time MacLeod had publicly read the story in its entirety.
Moneyquote:
When I write a story, when I’m halfway through, I write the last sentence. I think of it as a lighthouse.
Report a tpyo
Attentive Contrarian readers will have noticed the new “Report a Tpyo” link at the top of each post:
Copy editing has never been Contrarian‘s long suit. Countless fine editors — Doug MacKay, Alexander Farrell, Jo-Anne MacDonald, Jack Thomas, Bill Turpin, Stacey Pineau, Penny Body, Doug McGee, and other too numerous — have saved my sorry bacon from embarrassment again and again.
Now it’s your turn. Often written in haste, Contrarian relies on crowd-sourcing for error correction. Mike Targett, Contrarian‘s techno-fixer and geopolitics scout, added the Report a Tpyo link to ease this process. Clicking the link brings up a pre-addressed email you can use to alert me to errors typographical, lexicological, or factual. Please indicate the headline on the post you are flagging.
Report a tpyo. Get it? That Targett, what a card!
The unbearable whiteness of flesh
If the largest news service in the United States still feels the need to run musty sidebars about the distaff side of state functions, then we can’t be too surprised when it makes a boo-boo this cringe-inducing:
First lady wears Naeem Khan gown to state dinner
By SAMANTHA CRITCHELL (AP) – 4 days ago
First lady Michelle Obama chose to wear a gleaming silver-sequined, flesh-colored gown Tuesday night to the first state dinner held by her husband’s administration. She was tending to her hostess duties in a strapless silhouette with the beads forming an abstract floral pattern that was custom-made by Naeem Khan.
Er, what color was that again?
As The American Prospect pointed out, Crayola got with the program in 1962, when it “voluntarily changed ‘flesh colored’ to ‘peach’ …partially as a result of the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.”
Sociological Images collected a gallery of images rooted in the same assumption. The website’s Lisa Wade of Occidental College wrote:
Part of the privilege of being white is having a society that considers you the norm and is, therefore, organized around you. A really nice example of this is “flesh” color. What is flesh color?
Contrarian confesses to feeling some sympathy for poor Samantha Critchell, who will wear this for a long, long time.
Vin Scully will call the play-by-play on his 60th Dodgers season
Vin Scully said last night that he would continue to serve as the Los Angeles Dodgers play-by-play announcer through the 2010 season. Scully, who turns 82 this month, began broadcasting Dodgers games in 1950.
Contrarian began listening to him not long after as a devoted Brooklyn Dodger fan living in Chappaqua, NY. Hiding under bed covers, ear pressed to the radio speaker, we heard games come alive through Scully’s gift for vivid similes.
He said Bob Gibson “pitches as though he’s double-parked.” He said, “Losing feels worse than winning feels good.” He said, “Sometimes it seems like [Bobby Bonilla's] playing underwater.” He said, “Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination.” He said, “When [Maury Wills] runs, it’s all downhill.”
While calling 1987 All-Star Game, Scully saw the Toronto Blue Jay’s uber-smooth shortstop Tony Fernandez for the first time. “He’s like a bolt of silk,” Scully said.
Because of Scully’s gift for words, we still prefer listening to baseball on the radio over watching it on TV. On the radio, games unfolds in your mind, unconstrained by camera angles and closeups. As the Terry Cashman tune puts it. “I saw it on the radio.”
After the jump, the word-for-word transcript of Scully calling the 9th inning of Sandy Koufax’s Perfect Game, September 9, 1965:
Generación Y
A few months ago, a friend and I spent a week in Cuba—not the usual Canadian stay in a beachside resort, but a week spent tramping the streets of Havana seeking out baseball games, opera, and the wonderful music that is the island nation’s rightful trademark.
We enjoyed the music and the weather, but the overwhelming impression was depressing: grinding poverty, decayed buildings, and the leaden air of a police state.
Last week, Yoani Sánchez, a 34-year-old Cuban writer, editor, and linguistics scholar, won the Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize for journalism that advances inter-American understanding. Cuban authorities exercise tight control over Internet access, but Sánchez somehow manages to write a critical blog, Generación Y (also available in an English version), cataloging with wit and grace the spirit-crushing quality of life under totalitarianism.
The Cuban government refused Sánchez’s request for permission to travel to New York for the award ceremony, but she managed to post a YouTube video of her acceptance speech. She also recounted her conversation with the functionary who denied her request for an exit visa. Moneyquote:
Clerk: At this time you cannot travel.
Yoani: Why don’t you want me to put one foot on a plane? What are you afraid of? What can this 110 pound person do? Create a tsunami? Why then won’t you let me leave the country?
Clerk: I already told you…
Yoani: You are being ridiculous. But no, I don’t want to repeat. You are making a travesty of life. This institution, that you represent, this permission to leave, some day this is going to end. My grandchildren are not going to live under these conditions. When I tell them the story of how the institutions of my country violated my rights, my right to travel, they’re not going to believe me. What will you tell your children? That you dedicated yourself to violating the rights of Cubans? Is that what you’ll say? Because really, I feel sorry for you for what you are going to have to tell your children in the future.
Obama’s first bad speech?
James Fallows, author, Atlantic Magazine writer, and erstwhile speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has cataloged with discernment his admiration for several of President Obama’s landmark speeches over the last 18 months. So it was surprising to read his prediction that the president’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize will flop.
Fallow’s argument is “probabilistic:” Of the hundreds of Nobel prize acceptance speeches delivered over the years, he contends, only one was ever noteworthy: the three-minute oration by novelist William Faulkner, a man notorious for hating to make speeches.
Here is Faulkner’s remarkable address, delivered on December 10, 1950:
The full text is after the jump:
Late advice from William Safire
A tribute this morning by Maureen Dowd to fellow New York Times columnist William Safire, the conservative speechwriter and elegant arbiter of English usage who died Sunday, contains a couple of gems.
When White House officials wouldn’t return calls, Safire suggested leaving a one-word message explaining what the caller wanted to discuss: “Malfeasance.”
Dowd once saw Safire having lunch with Bert Lance, a former Carter administration official whom he had eviscerated in columns that won Safire a Pulitzer and cost Lance his job. When Dowd asked why he’d been breaking bread with this former nemesis, Safire explained, “Only hit people when they’re up.”
