P.S. Everyone needs toucan stubs.
October 2011
From Steve Jobs’s obituary in the New York Times:
He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”
I think this is one of Jobs’s big (and I hope lasting) ideas: taste isn’t a small thing. It’s evidence of culture, humanity, innovation and beauty.
Jobs famously said this about Microsoft’s (lack of) taste:
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products. … and you say, Why is that important? and, well, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, that’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac they would never have that in their products.
Further proof of Muphry’s law?
I’m still trying to figure this one out. It’s a recent ad from nytimes.com home page.
So, self-discovery starts with a quiz, followed by personalized product recommendations? Oh.
Soon he is lambasting “the toadying vice-chancellor straining for a knighthood; the administrator ‘quislings’ … , and the managerialist undead presently dancing on spreadsheets before arranging redundancies for junior staff paid a sixth of their own salaries,” and calling them “these creatures” they are not even human any more! who are “to a monstrous degree complicit in the muffled mendacities and self-serving mutilations of the new policies.”
Lingua Franca | Attack the Muffled Mendacities of the Administrative Creatures
Urban Dictionary offers this definition for ‘friscalating,’ the wonderful word (not real) used by the character Eli Cash in the Royal Tennenbaums.
Is there a word to describe a made-up word whose meaning is immediately clear? Friscalating would qualify as one of those words.
And was Cash’s purple writing and “obsolete vernacular” meant to be a parody of Cormac McCarthy’s style?
Pssst! First time here? Welcome! Here’s what you need to know.
