Articulation. Shallow-seatedness. Ahh, brackets.
In which I offer you a new Tone Knob side-dish for your eyeball pleasure.
Hello hello 👋
So, it’s been bothering me. When I write Tone Knob, there’s loads that doesn’t make the cut: Brands doing great stuff, but not quite enough for a whole piece. Trends and topical vibes. Tangents and half-thoughts. So in between regular Tone Knobs, I’m gonna send these
rattlebagscarefully curated selections. If they’re not your jam, ignore them. A regular Tone Knob will be along shortly.Fourteens, here we come. Oh, and they’ll be coming at you as ‘fourteens’. Or more prosaically, as a numbered lists of fourteen things. Because reasons1.
The Yardy Boys. Poop Zoomies. Darth Vader’s Dick. Ahhh joy! Caitlin Barrett’s ‘Naming For Everyone’ goes deep into why WhatsApp group chat names are often gross, weird and transgressive, and why this is a Good Thing. (No surprise that ‘Naming for Everyone’ is my new favourite Substack.)
‘Fourteens’ is a lovely example of ‘naming something into existence’ – something I’m always on the lookout for, in the way that bird-spotters are always searching for [oh I don’t know, whichever birds are rare but turn up reasonably regularly in your part of the world.]
The White-rumped sandpiper. The Balearic Shearwater. The Dotterel. Those are the rare birds round these parts. Tbh, I only googled them to see if the bird-joke (see item 3 above) could work better. Now I’m feeling ashamed that I probably know more image compression filenames than I know bird species. (EPS, JPEG, PNG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF…)
Speaking of compression…
How many compression garments is too many compression garments? (Thanks for sending me this, Adam. I’ve looked at it at least once a day for the last several months.) ‘Mavis Beacon’ was named into existence. If you learned to touch type on a computer in the 90s, it was likely with the ‘Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing’ software. She was ‘one of the most influential black women in technology’. She was also a fictional character. Her name was chosen because ‘Mavis’ sounded solid and traditional, and ‘Beacon’ is ‘guiding light’. I got all this from Nancy Friedman’s newsletter about her. There’s even a documentary – ‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’. I will be watching it this weekend. If you do too, hit me up.
‘My views are not deep-seated. They are shallow-seated’. Shallow-seated! What a phrase! That’s AJ Jacobs on the importance of not becoming dogmatic. I’ll be using that as often as possible for the next few weeks. (I find I need a conscious period of over-use to ‘bed in’ a new phrase.)
Let bad GPT be your guide. Yesterday I spoke to a developer who builds bespoke GPTs. He said he spends so much time with AI’s voice in his head – that particular way it has of over-confidently waffling – that it’s inadvertently made him a better writer: ‘now I instinctively think what would GPT say, then I don’t write that.’
Brackets (these things) are like a ‘magic rubix cube’. Ha! Dr Florence Hazrat puts it thus: ‘Brackets instantly turn a somewhat simplistic, square, linear ducks-in-a-row sentence into an intricate controversial hot pulsing thought you need to actually engage in. You need to shuffle its parts around, see what fits where, like a magic rubix cube.’ That’s from her thing about ‘favourite punctuation marks of ADHDers’. (There’s TONS of goodness in this post. Go read it now.)
There’s ‘what you say’, and there’s ‘how you say it’. It’s always bothered me tone of voice is framed this way – that first there’s ‘content’, then separately you slap on some ‘tone’. It’s not true, is it. What you notice about the world, and how you bring it forth in language are two sides of the same coin.
‘Articulation’ is the word I’m looking for. I found it in L.M. Sachasas’s excellent Convivial Society piece about Large Language Models and the risk that using ChatGPTs and whatnot pose to the ‘labour of articulation’. Essentially – how wrestling with ‘finding the right words’ is one of the important ways we make ourselves human. Which, as it happens, I was prompted to re-visit after reading Evan Armstrong casually use the example of using AI to ‘write an email to his mom saying he won’t be home for Christmas’. Ironically, I can’t find the right words to express how simultaneously hilarious and appalling that sounded.
Wanna see me talk IRL? I’m gonna be speaking at CopyCon 2024 in London – largely about what writing three years’ worth of Tone Knobs has taught me about the ‘golden age of brand voice’. Are you gonna be there? Come find me and say hi.
Fourteen already?! How was that for you? Hit reply and let me know. Ta.
The ‘list of fourteen’ is a form I’ve copied from Sherman Alexie’s poem ‘Sonnet, with Bird’. It’s a surprisingly powerful form – fourteen is the perfect number to get you far from shore and safely back again. I used it for several years in my weekly newsletter The Notices (currently dormant because writing two newsletters, although a total joy, didn’t leave any room for actual paying client work.)