Bobulate

When yesterday I received an email signed “rgds,” a trite valediction closing an email to a group of professionals, I stopped. Rgds? Really?

See also:
Some Srs Bsns: Are Words Without Vowels Rlly More Efficient?

Was the emailer intending to communicate familiarity with his recipient by dropping the vowels in “regards,” or was he simply demonstrating tired sophistication with the keyboard — too familiar was he with keystrokes that vowels were an interference and, therefore, a waste of time in the rhetoric between us? Or was it simply that everything is now bound by constraints even when we are constraintless?

No matter the reason, vowels are now the victims, and as a result, it seems fitting to compose an ode in response.

To what consonant altar have we subscribed to?

And what innocent A E I O or U has been sacrificed?

Thou still impoverished and vanishing ever more quickly,

Dear friends! Who can now explain,

The reason more aptly than our current style:

Why we’ve simply banished the unaware vowel?

Just as quickly as we forget E-I-E-I-O, we adopt truncation,

In email, we sign “rgrds;” in retribution, we give “thx,”

Too much in a hurry to round out the fuller sounds.

What mad pursuit do consonants offer? What ecstasy might they bring?
If “I before E except after C” is relinquished to merely “C,”
What substance do we have left before?

Thanks to Keats.

Old posts in transition. This original post written in 2009.

When it comes to answering the phone, I’ve never been one for ceremony. I learned early on that our family was nothing if not practical. When I visited friends’ houses, they would impress us with phone etiquette, “The Barrett residence; this is Brendan speaking,” in their flat eight-year-old voices. But the Danzico kids: we just answered with a simple “hello.” It got the job done. And after my brief childhood contemplations about the formalities of the Barrett hello, I gave little thought to picking up a telephone.

Until now.

Where it once seemed innocuous, “hello” is now causing me downright anxiety. The word — a common way of greeting someone when answering the phone — is standard in the United States and fairly common both in England and France. It’s about as routine as making toast or turning on a light. It’s something we do to initiate and give a sort of permission for a conversation to start.

See also:
15 other expressions that have run their course

The problem is that “hello” has gone the way of VCRs, Crockpots, and Pink Pearl erasers. While we keep it around for all its perceived usefulness, it is simply not necessary anymore, and no one is admitting it.

“Hello” is a leftover.

A greeting without a cause

The word, once having such a prominent place in social interactions, has now been rendered unnecessary by caller ID. With 90% of Americans having mobile phones and 96 cell subscriptions for every 100 people in the world, chances are, caller identification lets us know who is calling before we answer. And we know you know that we know who is calling.

So why greet one another with a meaningless word?

We see a person’s name (e.g., “Mom”) displayed even before we take the call. But we continue on with what is arguably a leftover formality, answering with a generic word. Then comes a feigned surprise. We play along, sometimes pretending astonishment at the sound of the caller’s voice.

Why this intentional inefficiency? Why not answer with a personal greeting?

Hello, you must be going

The origin of the word seems surprisingly unknown. While it is well-documented that Alexander Graham Bell himself originally tried to use “Ahoy, Ahoy” to answer the phone, the reason for the switch is not clear. People in the 1880s needed a greeting that would take the place of what happened on the streets when one met a stranger.

Much later, in the seminal Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Paco Underhill talks about the landing strip that humans need when they enter a store. The first eight feet of a store are useless, because people don’t see them. They are in effect blind to the entryways, and store owners know that this is dead space and goes unused. Perhaps Americans need the same landing strip when initiating a phone conversation?

Get to the point

See also:
Goodbye may be harder than it seems

Other cultures don’t seem to need it; they jump right in. Italians answer, “Ready,” leaving it up to the caller to demand, “Who’s speaking?” In Spain and Mexico, they answer “Speak.” And like the Italians, the Mexicans will demand: “Where am I calling?” And if they have the wrong number, they’ll indignantly hang up, sometimes with a curse, as if it were the respondent’s fault. While curt, sure, these are more straightforward.

Each culture may need a different way to take calls, and perhaps it’s time we review how how we do it. Let’s look at where technology has brought us and get to the point.

Old posts in transition. This original post written in 2007.

Forget what you’ve heard about first impressions; it’s the last impressions that count. Last impressions — whether they’re with customer service or a date — are the ones we remember. They’re the ones that keep us coming back. But there’s one kind of final impression that people seem to forget.

Were this 1904, according to A Dictionary Of Etiquette: A Guide to Polite Usage For All Social Functions, standard conclusions were: I remain sincerely yours, or, Believe me faithfully yours.

The email signoff — that line that you write before you type your name — has been all but forgotten. Go take a look at your inbox: you might be astonished at how little attention people pay to the closing lines when writing email. This underrated rhetorical device is so frequently disregarded that many people have the gall to simply attach an automatic one to their email or mobile signature.

Closing lines vary from the possibly self-conscious (“My warmest regards,”) to the often charmless (”Best,“). They, at least in my inbox, revealed the following:

Tnx

Best

Word

Later

Laters

Thanks

Cheers

Cheery

Take care

Feel better

All the best

Safe travels
Love you all

Super great
Best regards

Get well soon

With gratitude

Thanks family

Your weary friend

Thanks in advance

Thanks, all the best

Don’t work too hard

Hope to see you Thursday

Hope to hear from you soon

Warm regards right back at ya

It seems there are patterns in closing line types. If ordered another way, they look like this:

Expressing gratitude

Tnx

Thanks

Thanks family

Thanks in advance

Thanks, all the best

Expressing general sentiment

Best

All the best

Best regards

Word

Later

Laters

Cheers

Cheery

Expressing affection

Love

Love you

Love you all

Expressing state

Your weary friend

With gratitude

Imperatives

Feel better

Take care

Safe travels

Get well soon

Don’t work too hard

Wishes

Hope to see you Thursday

Hope to hear from you soon!

Warm regards right back at ya

Lastly

You may want to peruse notes on “notes and shorter letters” from 1922, including a personal favorite, How to Address Important Personages.

With all of these, the intensity and — dare I say — sincerity varies depending on punctuation. A warm “Thanks!” can have quite a different sentiment than a flat “Thanks,”. We can’t be expected to neatly tie up every email every time. But once in a while, it would be delightful if we applied the same sincerity to the last impression that we do to the first.

Yours.

Old posts in transition. This original post written in 2007.

This is New York. A city that can be at once deeply familiar but also newly restless on the same block. A city whose very material for being is serendipity. A giver of anonymity and a giver of the densest participation in humanity. And still, with all its gifts, it requires only one thing of us: utility. The only thing New York requires of its citizens, its tourists, its commuters, its passerbys, its participants, is to use the city. The only thing one cannot do in New York City is embrace it with apathy.

This is New York. We come here unfinished, looking to the city for answers, for solitude, assignment, and for reward — looking for someplace to finish our sentences. And the city, in turn, presents endless possibilities. No matter if one lives here a year or a life, if utility is the city’s aspiration, then its reward is its neighborhoods.

Recently, I moved — all of 1.8 miles. After 11 years in one Brooklyn neighborhood, I moved just over 9,500 feet to the east. New Yorkers live and breathe by the people and services on a single city block, so moving this far is just as well moving countries. Changing currencies. Allegiances. Time zones. But without sympathy. Because it is, after all, still one city.

When I moved from the East Village of Manhattan to Brooklyn, I saw neighborhoods unlike I’d seen before. “The city,” as Manhattan is called if one is a Brooklynite, has neighborhoods of course. Yet Brooklyn has them at a different scale and speed. Within a month of moving to Carroll Gardens, I’d been offered protection, welcome-baked-goods, and was head of some sort of block-party planning committee. In more than a decade there, I’d been locked out, delighted, broken into, loved, infuriated, and everything in between. And I relied on the people on my block to be there for me through it all.

I now live on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn — the kind of Grand Central of our borough — where the steady traffic and sirens are a nightly lullaby. It’s no pastoral neighborhood, but the frenetic diversity of pace, scale, sounds, lights, and people to befriend envelops one in possibility. It’s less bake sale more survivalism, less Hopper more Pollack. Invitations to help and dine together are frequent, and neighbors hang even closer together. Islands of neighbordom against the fray. With neighbors, anything is possible.

This is a city I came to with aspiration, and a city I return to aspiring to be inspired again. Of all the cities, it may be New York who is the most unflappable, the most infallible, the most impenetrable, but the most loyal and the most forgiving. As such, it is New York City itself who is unfinished, its unkempt seams and its unsmooth asphalt, its uptown arts and its devoted downtown, living undone, side by side.

This is New York. A city of neighbors making the unfinished finished.
It’s been spat on and praised, paved over and cheered on. It needs us to finish its sentences. For despite all of the promised anonymity of this singular city, “New York City” is plural.

In his unending wisdom, author Umberto Eco reminds us that there is wisdom in what is not done, wisdom in what is not finished.

Eco is allegedly the owner of a large personal library of 30,000 books, and separates visitors to his library into two categories: 1) the large majority who visit asking “how many of these have you read!?” — the impressed — and 2) those — a very small minority — who get that books are not for show, but for research. And that unread books are far more valuable to us than read ones.

As such, our personal libraries should contain as much of what we don’t know as what we do. They should contain the possible. The aspirational. They should contain the future.

In other words, the unfinished is far more valuable than the finished. The un-figured out far more valuable than the figured out.

Eco called this concept the anti-library.

People don’t walk around calling themselves anti-entrepreneurs or promoting their anti-CVs. We don’t promote our anti-knowledge and our anti-degrees. But maybe we should.

The love of books is much celebrated; the love of reading too. Yet the love of not reading — the letting of books pile up around us — is a quiet pursuit.

This post was the introduction to a Facebook panel, “99% Unfinished,” at Brooklyn Beta. Thanks Russ for inviting me. Thanks Maria for the title.

Let’s celebrate the stories of people we thought we’d once be; stories of languages we thought we’d once learn; places we thought we’d once visit; hobbies never learned; pursuits never pursued. These need not be stories of what wasn’t, but stories of what was instead.

Let’s celebrate books owned, but never read. Pages unfolded. Chapters unfinished. Marginalia unwritten.

And celebrate lives lived.

If there is one thing I’m absolutely expert at, it’s not finishing projects. I am a serial starter, an absolutely fantastic middle-of-the-project doer, and an expert project quitter. I know when to quit. And I do.

I’ve quit gardening. I’ve quit German, the language, entirely. I’ve quit living in Japan. I’ve quit knitting and French Horn lessons. 

In fact, if there is anything that has been successful in my life, it’s been the ability to recognize the need to quickly jettison a project, an idea, a thing, and move on.

But until recently, I kept this a secret. Somehow, while our design processes celebrate iteration and throwing things away, our culture scorns switching and quitting. We don’t celebrate stopping things, changing our paths, or our minds. Just the opposite. We celebrate finishing things.

Human beings have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore and to learn.“ —as told by Dan Pink

We’re so busy tracking completion — how many miles run, books read, calories burned, cities visited — that we forget to remember a project’s value in the first place. In our race just to finish, we underestimate the benefits of quitting. I want to come out of the unfinished project closet. I want to consider the benefits of starting.

Despite my dozens of inactive blogs, unrealized side projects, and fallow domain names, next week, I start (another) new side project. And thus begins another new possibility for uncertainty, for quitting, and for happiness.

I’m ready.

I think a lot about what I would say to the younger version of myself if I met her again, if I met her through the still moments of all the motion of youth — when she was sitting at the piano, or if I saw her alone on the playground, or if I watched her read, voice quivering, her short stories in front of the class.

If I met the younger version of myself, we’d take a walk — the same walk I take every day — so I could explain to young me that routine and tradition are paramount. You have to choose a category header, but it’s only as permanent as you need it to be. You have to choose a theme song and stay with it. Decide. If only for an hour or a day or a week.

See also:
One equals one

If I met me, but younger, we’d talk about the value of one thing. You have to choose one thing to do for yourself every day. No matter what practice you choose — how fulfilling or meaningful — it will sometimes overwhelm you. Choose something for yourself every day. Do it repeatedly and without fail. If you do something for yourself every day, no matter how many standoffs or negotiations or letdowns you face throughout the day, no one can take that away from you.

If I met younger me, we would sit quietly and listen to music. We might put instruments we did not know how to play in our laps. “Play,” I would encourage. Younger me would stare straight ahead uncomfortably. “No one knows what they’re doing,” I would continue. “Being expert means starting. Knowing is playing your first note.” We would scratch out notes on new instruments together.

See also:
On love

If I met me, but many years before, we’d talk about love and time. Love will not be polite. It does not wait for opportune moments to approach you. It knows not your life plans or schedule or current or future intentions. It will not wait for you to be ready. There is, in this way, no time for it. If you wait for it, then, it will not come. As love — for a person, a profession, a practice, a city — comes to you. It crosses your path and is only yours to accept. It is up to you to open your hands and heart.

I used to think life was an intricate series of spreadsheets and grids, weights and balances, promotions and boardroom standoffs. As grew older I realized life is less grid and more raw data, less stop sign and more yield, less urban and more sprawl. Life passes by in seasons, not days, and best we can do is choose our category headers, theme songs, and instruments to make the most of every day. With that, we can see the world as we move through it.

Because there is stillness in motion.

First written for AIGA Centennial Voices series, September 2014.