Category: communication

Campus incidents push ‘to taze’ into the popular lexicon

Higher education can take a bow for its role in helping to push the runner-up word of the year into the spotlight.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s news blog, “to taze’ is the runner-up word of the year for the New Oxford American Dictionary. As the news blog points out, the verb’s rise owes much to two controversial campus incidents — one at the University of Florida and another at UCLA.

The dictionary chose “locavore” as its 2007 word of the year. The term “refers to a movement that encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food.”

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Now playing: Fleetwood Mac – Second Hand News
via FoxyTunes

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Now playing: Fleetwood Mac – Dreams
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Friday Five: not that you asked, but…

The Internet is full of unsolicited advice. Some of it is even useful. Here are five bits of counsel that may interest you:

  1. For writers: Five easy steps to editing your own work, by Anna Goldsmith of The Hired Pens, guest blogging at CopyBlogger.
  2. For marketers struggling with ROI of social media: Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent offers some ideas about measurement as part of a marketing meme making the rounds.
  3. For communicators, marketers, history buffs and closet socialists: FutureLab offers a lesson in mass communications with Soviet Propaganda – The Art of Mass Persuasion. Posted by Ilya Vedrashko on Thursday, the 90th anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, it features Vedrashko’s slide show of images that “showcase some of the tools and techniques used by the Soviet AgitProp (agitation and propaganda) as well as other governments, democratic and otherwise, and how some of the imagery was borrowed by brand marketers.” Makes you wonder who really won the cold war.
  4. For web designers and managers: Sam Jackson’s take on why college and university web sites don’t make the grade.
  5. For alumni relations folks: Andy Shaindlin (alumni futures) introduces a new Facebook group just for you.

Bonus link: discovered later but for everyone — be they writers, editors, designers, marketers, bosses, bureaucrats, teachers, students … anyone and everyone: 10 Simple, Sure-fire Ways to Make Today Your Best Day Ever. Just gloss over the metaphysical portions if you like (although I recommend reading the whole thing). If you don’t read it today, read it before you go to work on Monday.

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Now playing: The New Pornographers – Adventures In Solitude
via FoxyTunes