We have a new office manager, Scout!

A Shout Out From Scout February 2013 As the new Office Manager of Cleis Press and Viva Editions, you can find me sniffing my way from desk to desk, boosting office morale and ensuring a fabulous working environment. On a ruff day, you can find me curled up next to some Cleis and Viva classics, like Beebo Brinker and Words of Love. My favorite afternoon activities include long naps in our sunny East Bay office, and begging for treats from our interns. Each month, I'd like to inform you of some of my new favorite books and employees here. Being the mutt brain that I am, my favorites books change as quickly as my favorite foods, but I look forward to sharing my ever-rotating interests with you, and maybe someday you can share some of your bacon with me. In my new role as Office Manager, I would love to hear your feedback and any questions or suggestions you might have. I am now on Twitter at @CleisScout. Since I have so much power around here, I decided I'm going to offer you a really special deal: buy 3 books, get 1 free of any Cleis Press and Viva Editions titles. We got some treats here on Valentine's Day with Arthur Plotnik on NPR's "Here and Now" talking about love and words, and the love of words. Rockstar author Tristan Taormino was in the New York Times about Fifty Shades of Fashion. My BFF twitter buddy Dr. Charlie Glickman is doing an international tour for The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure. Be sure to join him at one of his events! If you need anything from me, or just want to connect, bark out a tweet! Cheers! Scout Office Manger Cleis Press & Viva Editions  Scout, the Cleis Pup Scout's Shout Outs Viva Editions, an imprint of Cleis Press, 2246 Sixth St., Berkeley, CA 94710

Excerpt of the Day: "Better Than Great" by Arthur Plotnik

Sadly, in this "age of awesome," our words and phrases of acclaim are exhausted. Even so, we find ourselves defaulting to such habitual choices as good, great, and terrific, or substitute the weary synonyms that tumble out of a thesaurus - superb, marvelous, outstanding, and the like. The piling on of intensifers such as the now-silly "super," only makes matters worse and negative modifiers render our common parlance nearly tragic.

Until now.

Better Than Great is the essential guide for describing the extraordinary—the must-have reference for anyone wishing to rise above tired superlatives. Arthur Plotnik, the wunderkind of word-wonks is, without mincing, proffering a well knit wellspring of worthy and wondrous words to rescue our worn-down usage. Plotnik is both hella AND hecka up to the task of rescuing the English language and offers readers the chance to never be at a loss for words!

Take a look:

Great

-Extremely Good

-Prized

-In Excellent Shape

-Distinguished

-Of Worldly Perfection

-Rich in Virtues

-Smart

A Tough Word to Beat

Toward the end of the 20th century, the venerable word great reigned as the default term for describing specialty. Used at all levels of speech, the term never seemed to exhaust itself, even within a sentence. Major events called for pile-ups, something like, “This great float honors one of the great gentlemen of the great State of California, and tomorrow two great teams will play what’s expected to be a great game before the greatest fans in this great nation.”

Today, if the word doesn’t quite put listeners to sleep, neither does it wake them to the wonders of anything. Approaching some two billion appearances in a Web search, it certainly has lost whatever specialty it had. If two billion things are special, what’s left to be ordinary? In conventional uses, great generates about one nanowatt of energy. Lately the word amazing has become slightly more energetic than great, but it, too, is accumulating usage numbers that suggest serious loss of clout.

The problem is that great, considered by itself, is still a great word, understandably employed for more than a thousand years for a range of uses detailed across two pages of The Oxford English Dictionary. Force comes from its very sound, starting with a growl (gr), which can be drawn out, followed by its long-a attention-getter, and concluding with an emphatic dental mute, the t. Quick and punchy, it serves as both adjective and noun (“one of the greats”) and shifts easily to the adverb greatly.

The word’s early meanings of “thick” and “coarse” suggest its relation to Old English grytta (coarse-ground meal). Even if its grit has been chewed to mush in overuse, it can still be freshened by novel intensifying devices. At least that is the rationale for including, among our alternatives to great, suggestions for intensifying this worthy old utterance: a blitzkrieg of greatness, fist-pumpingly great, great served hot, greatness in high relief, and thwackingly great, to name just five of dozens.

What will the next hot modifier be? Hard to say; such terms slide in and out of fashion, emerging from standard synonyms, street-slang favorites, and pop-star locutions. “You look mahvelous,” intoned comedian Billy Crystal, and suddenly everyone was intoning it. Even tha shiznit got its run after Snoop Doggy Dog rapped it, never mind its etymology. But the zing of any term fades after the first few thousand uses and even faster among youth subcultures. Campus superlatives such as bonus, core, key, or summit? So 20th century. The once-hot teen superlatives phat and fetch? So yesterday for teens (though still in play for the rest of us).

Fading or not, certain acclamatory terms—great, amazing, brilliant, terrific, and wonderful among them— continue to serve as what Stuart Berg Flexner described as “blurred words”:

“… used quickly and without much thought, almost as

automatic responses, because they are easily available….

The words are not always precise, which is one reason

we like them so much…. [We] avoid arguments and fine

distinctions we would rather not make.”

—Listening to America

But Flexner notes that while the words are imprecise, “we do want them to be forceful.” Unfortunately, wanting does not do the job. For serious word users, it is invention, experimentation, discovery, and open-mindedness that puts the grrr back in terms of acclaim.

High praise for Plotnik's book of praise!

Better than Great: A Cure for Buzzwords and Marketing Speak
by ADAM SHERK on JUNE 1, 2011

Twice in the past year I’ve covered the most overused PR buzzwords and marketing speak and press release buzzword abuse. It is fun to point out the biggest offenders but even well-intentioned marketing communicators can find it difficult to avoid them.

Ready to stop being a “leading provider” of “unique,” “innovative” and “award winning” overused terms but need a solution? (Doh! “Solution” is an overused term too. But not in this context, so I get a pass.)



Enter Better than Great, Arthur Plotnik’s new book containing nearly 6,000 alternate terms for praise and acclaim. Arthur mentioned that he was working on it in the comments of my first buzzwords post and now that it’s been released I’m happy to say he achieved his aim and then some.

Better than Great covers a wide range of fresh superlatives in a number of categories, pulling from rare gems and vintage gold all the way through current phrases influenced by hip-hop.

To show the book in action while proving that point that portions of press releases do sometimes get picked up in media and blog coverage I’ll quote directly from the release that Associate Publisher Brenda Knight sent to me:

“Better than Great is the must-have reference for anyone seeking to rise above tired superlatives when the quality of acclaim matters….Critics, copywriters, journalists, poets, speakers, sales reps, bloggers, Twitterers – word-slingers from the whole digital and literary spectrum – should find it to be a concussively brilliant, euphoriant, supernal, larky, trill, spikeable, epiphanic, über-cool, soul-juddering experience, an upful of endorphining jubilee to make the heart warble.”

While we probably need to call out the use of “must-have” that paragraph sure is jam-packed with non-overused terms.

Now admittedly the best antidote for marketing speak in press releases is to explain things simply in clear, direct terms and let the media professionals take it from there. So blending in some of Arthur’s fresh superlatives won’t always be the right approach.

But there are plenty of forms of marketing communications that could use of an injection of less-worn adjectives and even press releases can benefit from some of Arthur’s offerings in the right situation.

So for writers of all shapes and sizes Better than Great is indeed just that.

Note: The book is just $10 on Amazon right now. I’ll avoid the link so this post doesn’t get misinterpreted as a play for affiliate revenue, but go check it out.


Related posts:

The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases
PRFilter Shows Press Release Buzzword Abuse Still Prevalent
My Top Posts of 2010 on SEO, PR and Social Media for News and Sports
Social Media News Releases Get 3x More Media Coverage
Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words