Seeing this graphic doing the rounds. Pretty. Still, call me a cynic, but:
1) [citation needed] – the full graphic lists multiple top-level sources, but without details – what were the exact sources? What was the methodology for identifying this data used by each of those sources? How credible is this information?
2) So what? What useful insight do these lump sums tell us without context? Most of the numbers are random, unrelated big figures, so how does this help us understand the world? What are the trends? What’s the insight?
This is superficially a great bit of marketing, as it’s getting shared a lot and is designed to promote a company flogging a data analytics platform. But there’s no further detail on their site, which is a masterclass in promising a lot (e.g. “Solve back-end integration of any data, at cloud scale, without moving data”) without actually saying or revealing anything about how their tools actually work. To find out more, you need to give them your contact details.
For true data geeks, as for ex-journalists like me, alarm bells start going off at this point:
– Data without context is meaningless
– Single data points don’t equal insight
– Data needs to be well sourced to warrant trust
– Don’t give away your data if you don’t know what you’re getting
Ethos (basically the speaker’s credibility or brand)
Logos (the subject & style of the message)
Pathos (effectively the audience’s response)
Prioritising pathos
For an artist, novelist, or even journalist, the first two of these are almost always the most important, with a strong emphasis on the second. While most artists and writers *want* to have a positive audience response to their work, their primary goal is to get their idea out there. Their ethos / reputation may help them reach an audience, but this is secondary to the logos of the work they’re producing: the subject they want to convey, and the way they – the authors of the work – decide to shape it is both their focus, and the focus of their audience.
In short, for an artist or writer, often it is the act of creation itself that is the goal. Getting a positive audience response is merely a bonus – and being forced to chase an audience can stifle their creativity and lead to both stress and bad work. Hence the cliche of the difficult second album…
By contrast, for marketing it’s the last of Aristotle’s three concepts – pathos, the response of the audience – which is most important. Without the right kind of audience response, a marketer’s work will have failed. Hence the birth of focus groups, testing, and the often quite derivative nature of advertising, as “creatives” are forced to shape their work not around a great creative concept in itself, as an artist would, but how that creative concept is likely to resonate with their target audience – pushing them into creativity by committee (always a killer), and a constant recycling of ideas that are known to work.
This focus on the audience’s response is how we’ve end up jumping all the way from Aristotle to Roland Barthes, the notoriously difficult to read late-20th century French semiotician. (But still, at least he’s not Pierre Bourdieu, who I may get to in a later piece in this series…)
Everything is subjective
Barthes’ most famous idea is that of the death of the author – basically the idea that the authorial/creative intentions behind a work of art/literature don’t matter; all that is important is the response of the audience.
To understand this response, Barthes – building on some of the concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure that helped give birth to semiotics, the study of signs (combined with some of Jacques Lacan’s ideas on psychology) – began to re-conceptualise the way meaning is created in culture and society.
Where for Saussure, the importance of semiotics was to help understand the connection between a symbol/sign (the signifier) – be that a sound, a word, or an image – and the thing or concept that symbol/sign was intended to represent (the signified), Barthes effectively took this one logical step further by pointing out that this two-way connection still didn’t get to the heart of the *meaning* of that sign/symbol, because meaning is entirely a matter of interpretation. The connection between signifier and signified is entirely subjective.
Why? Well, because all of us have different knowledge, experience, ideas, attitudes, needs and expectations.
Emojis and meaning
Emojis are a good example. Take this one: Originally designed to represent a Chinese dumpling, the emoji’s creator specifically had dumplings in mind when she made it, arguing:
“The dumpling is actually universal. Georgia has khinkali. Japan has gyoza. Korea has mandoo. Italy has ravioli. Polish people have pierogi. Russian people have pelmeni. Argentians have empanadas. Jewish people have kreplachs. Chinese people have potstickers and various other dumplings. Tibet and Nepal have momos. Turkish people have manti.”
As emojis are intended as shorthand signs to speed up communication, arguing for a dumpling emoji based on that logic is pretty sound.
When I first saw it, I initially thought it was a Cornish pasty – a type of food I grew up on. This wasn’t explicitly included in the creator’s initial list – but it was there in the spirit.
In other words, a symbol that means one thing to one person could mean something very different to someone else. (A bit like when my mother kept on signing off text messages with “LOL”, meaning “Lots Of Love”, and I was reading it as “Laugh Out Loud” and wondering what was so funny.)
Back to Barthes and a multitude of meanings
Anyway, all this is to illustrate one of Barthes’ key points: Meaning isn’t as simple as there being a direct connection between a signifier (word/image/sign) and signified (thing/concept). Instead you also need to consider the interpretation of both.
This led to Barthes’ modification of Suassure’s bilateral signifier-signified relationship into a trilateral model:
Representamen: the signifier / sign / word / image / sound used to represent a concept or thing
Object: the signified / thing / concept being represented
Interpretant: the person decoding the meaning denoted by both Representamen and Object – a meaning that may vary wildly from interpretant to interpretant depending on their personal context
In other words, there is no single objective, definitive, “correct” interpretation of any given representamen, because the meaning of such signifiers (and even the objects/signifieds they are intended to represent) will constantly change according to context.
An alcoholic example
Take the phrase “I want some alcohol” to illustrate the point.
In one sense, “alcohol” always means the same thing – reading that word, you *think* you know what I mean by it in writing it down. But – as with the emoji example above – what kind of alcohol is, to you, representative? Beer? Whisky? Wine? Gin? A fancy cocktail with an umbrella in it?
In Japanese, the word for alcohol is sake – which is fairly familiar to English speakers as Japanese rice wine. Ask for sake in a Japanese bar (at least, if you’re obviously not Japanese, like me), and that’s what’ll be delivered, even though the word technically means all types of alcohol.
But what if you’re a surgeon, talking about medical alcohol to clean your scalpel? Or Muslim, and alcohol is forbidden by your religion? Or an alcoholic, and the very thought of it represents a constant temptation and potential relapse? Or, to a lesser degree, what if it’s nine o’clock on a Saturday morning and you’ve got a hangover?
And then there’s the time and place (kairos, for Aristotle). “I want some alcohol” if you’re the surgeon in the operating theatre above will be purposeful, urgent, obviously related to a specific medical need. Say it at the end of a long working day, it could be an sign that you’ve worked hard and deserve a reward, or that you’ve been worked *too* hard and are feeling depressed, or just that you’d like to spend some time with your colleagues in a social environment. Say it at seven o’clock in the morning, and it likely means you’re an alcoholic (unless you’ve been going all night, in which case it means you’re a bit of a party animal – unless you’ve been going all night and you’re in your forties, in which case it means you’re having a mid-life crisis, and probably a little bit sad).
Even if both you as author and interpretant as reader are agreed roughly on what specific type of alcohol you’re referring to, there are still additional contextual meanings that the interpretant will layer on top of your representamen, often subconsciously, that will trigger very different responses.
Again, Aristotle got in there first – because this is pretty much what he had in mind with the idea of pathos: the emotional response of the audience to the rhetorical approach you, as speaker, have taken.
It’s always about your audiences – plural
So, if everything is subjective, context is everything to interpretation, and the intended meaning and interpreted meaning can vary wildly from person to person and context to context, what does this mean for effective communication?
Well, it basically means that it’s very, very difficult to communicate effectively.
But there is hope – Barthes doesn’t go as far as his fellow postmodernist Jacques Derrida (of whom more another time, probably) and argue that all this means things are changing so much there is ultimately no such thing as meaning.
But what it does mean is that we shouldn’t make assumptions about how what we’re trying to say will be interpreted. We need to think more about principles of inclusive design when starting to craft our messages. We need to constantly self-criticise and consider the vast range of cultural, linguistic, social, educational, and personal experiences of our audiences. And to recognise that audiences are always plural – even if the audience is a single person, because their mindset and mood will vary depending on the context in which they encounter the thing it is they are interpreting.
To anticipate all these variants may well be impossible. But if your job is to convey meaning and to try to persuade – as it is for marketers and advertisers – then your job is to attempt to anticipate as many as possible.
Anticipating responses – and adapting accordingly
Which is why, to be a successful marketer, a basic understanding of the media, of creative techniques, of the product you’re marketing and the sector you’re in – the traditional needs of the industry – is not enough. To be effective needs a far broader understanding of the context in which your work will be interpreted by your target audiences. And these audiences are far more complex than can ever hope to be summed up on a PowerPoint slide as a “persona”. To try and anticipate their responses needs an awareness of a huge range of potential variables – far more than the simplistic, old-school advertising approach focusing on fairly simplistic demographics.
This is why, as I continue this series exploring the art of persuasion and the theories and best practices that underlie marketing, I’m going to continue to branch out into other areas – from semiotics to sociology to anthropology to literary criticism to linguistics to economics to psychology to philosophy to history and more. Because ultimately, the only way to get close to persuading is to try to understand and anticipate the vast range of ways what we, as creators, are doing can be interpreted, and construct our attempts at persuasion backwards from this knowledge.
Barthes never quite got to an all-encompassing theory of meaning to create a roadmap of how to do this, having died mid-flow at the age of 64 after being run over by a laundry van following a convivial lunch with future French President Francois Mitterand and the philosopher Michel Foucault (of whom, probably, more another time). I doubt I’ll be the one to pick up the baton. And it may well be impossible anyway – even tapping into the potential promise of AI to analyse vast datasets and interpret correlations and likely causations of meaning and influence.
So, as I’m going to start writing about what I’m reading (and occasionally watching or listening to), primarily to explore a bit more about what I do for a living, I should at least start at the beginning. Even if I’m likely to jump around a lot afterwards.
The true beginnings of the art of persuasion came earlier, but Aristotle was one of the first (that we have surviving records for) to start codifying it into more of a science. As with a surprisingly large amount of Aristotle, a lot still stands.
First, what does Aristotle define rhetoric as being?
“The faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
In other words, rhetoric is all about knowing how to select the right tactics to effectively persuade a given audience on a given topic in a given circumstance.
There are “non-technical” means of persuasion – evidence, witnesses, etc. – but these lie outside the speaker’s direct control. Instead Aristotle’s rhetoric mostly focuses on “technical” approaches, which he terms “appeals” .
These he focuses on the three key elements of the situation:
Speaker
Subject
Audience
With a bit of elaboration and nuance, these become the three core elements of classical rhetoric – and remain insanely relevant today:
1) Ethos: the speaker’s character
Basically the impression you give. Your character as given through your approach – but also your past reputation. Your ethos needs to inspire confidence, and increase the perception that you are credible.
This, in other words, is pretty much your brand.
It’s built up by a combination, Aristotle reckons, of good sense, good will, and good morals. If any of these are suspect – or successfully undermined by a rival (or an annoying comment on social media pointing out a bit of hypocrisy), your attempt at persuasion is less likely to succeed.
2) Logos: the argument made about the subject
This covers both substance – what you’re arguing – and the style – how you present it.
A combination of the idea and the wording, this is what many marketers and advertisers focus on the most. It’s the concept. The copywriting. The compelling call to action.
Most important – and something I keep focusing on, frustrated with seeing far too much shallow marketing – Aristotle insists that style and substance need to work hand in hand. They need to complement each other, not compete.
Fancy words without depth are pointless sophistry, empty rhetoric – and your audience will soon find you out.
3) Pathos: the emotion conjured in the audience
Positive or negative, triggering emotional reactions in your audience makes them more likely to pay attention and remember what you’re telling them. This is now proven by science – brain scans and clinical trials have demonstrated this point pretty much conclusively. Aristotle just got in a couple of thousand years early.
The challenge, of course, is to trigger the appropriate emotional response for the argument you’re making, among the audience you’re trying to persuade, to achieve the desired response. Aristotle lists 14 emotions – fear, confidence, anger, friendship, calm, enmity, shame, shamelessness, pity, kindness, envy, indignation, emulation, and contempt – but more recent psychologists have expanded this.
Balancing the sell
To be persuasive requires a balance of all three elements. But, of course, the balance needed varies depending on subject, audience, intention, and the reputation of the speaker/brand doing the persuading.
But, let’s face it, this is pretty much the core of selling:
Ethos: This product / brand is good / reliable
Logos: Because it will do X in Y way
Pathos: And make your life better / prevent it from getting worse
Of course, it’s all a lot more complicated than that. That’s why there’s so many other rhetorical devices out there to play with. Of all these, there’s one more from Aristotle it’s important to cover in an introductory piece:
4) Kairos: it’s all about timing
You can be credible, emotionally considered, and have style and substance dripping from every pore – but if you time your appeal wrong, it’s never going to work.
Take this very post…
I’m writing this on a Monday evening. That’s a decent enough time for writing – especially as I had the day off and am feeling fresh and relaxed. But is it a good time for publishing? Most advice would say no. Even if I’d clearly defined my target audience, 10:30pm UK time is just about the worst time to publish anything: European audiences are heading to bed; American audiences are finishing up work for the day; Asian audiences are still asleep. If I wanted to reach my audience immediately, publishing now would be madness.
But it’s not just about the time on the clock – it’s also about appropriateness. We’ve had plenty of examples of this in the last few months of coronavirus lockdowns – some messages simply became out of place, and various ad campaigns have had to be pulled as businesses have shut down and travel and gatherings of people stopped.
Bringing it all together – or screwing it all up
The last couple of weeks of Black Lives Matter protests has also underscored the importance of appropriateness of messaging.
While some brands were quick to put out messages of support, others dithered – making them look bad.
Of the brands that did put out supportive messages, most got the emotion (rousing, empathetic) and style right (adopting the plain black background of the main BLM movement in solidarity), but some were accused of failing on substance. Vague supportive noises were simply not seen as strong enough by many – because to be an ally is to speak up, take a stand, and act, not just stand there mumbling platitudes.
And many more brands fell down on the ethos side: They may have said the right things, in the right way, at the right time, with the right emotion – but their actions behind the scenes ensured they simply weren’t credible. How many brands were called out for their claims to want more racial equity, only to receive the (fair) response: “How many Black people are on your board?” or “What’s the racial pay gap in your company?”
Persuasion can be a technical thing, in other words. You can study the art of rhetoric to develop appropriate strategies and deploy the right tactics. But while you can fool some of the people some of the time, and persuade some people for a while, you can’t fool everyone for ever.
Still, use these four points from Aristotle as a foundation for working out your strategy, and at least you’ve got the basics in place.
Which is probably why pretty much every marketing strategy deck still includes them in some form or other, albeit in agency speak rather than ancient Greek… At my current place we do this quite directly, referring to Wisdom (a form of ethos), Wonder (a form of logos) and Delight (a form of pathos), topped off with a bit of Velocity (one approach to kairos) – as well as a few additions like Atomisation, designed to acknowledge that different audiences (and different media) require different approaches.
There’s a lot more to it than this, of course. Aristotle alone wrote enough for a whole book about it… I’m planning on following up with more on the art and science of persuasion in the coming weeks and months. Watch this space.
I’m not normally one for posting random aphorisms of motivational/aspirational self-improvement (far too journalistically cynical), but this – from Francis Bacon’s Essays, written a good 400 years ago – strikes me as an ideal personal manifesto for someone in my line of business:
“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider… Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
Francis Bacon, Essays
At this time of deep confusion, frustration and rising anger, more reading, consideration, deliberation and self-reflection can only be a good thing.
Guess how I’ll be spending the weekend?
In fact, after an additional period of consideration since I first posted this on LinkedIn, this quote may even have inspired me to start blogging more regularly again. Because I always used to use my old blog – the once-popular, occasionally influential EUtopia – as a way to shape my ideas, and it was often therapeutic, and helpful.
By semi-regularly writing about things that caught my eye in the world of politics, I honed my thinking, identified interesting trends, and – for a period – became what would now be deemed an influencer in the relatively niche space of the Brussels Bubble.
Now, the world of politics is too depressing to tackle direct. But instead I’m increasingly interested in how ideas – and ideologies – are shaped. How different people see the world. How opinions are formed. How a sense of identity is shaped by both internal and external forces.
This is, of course, an extension of my old political blog’s founding aim – and even of its strapline (“In search of a European identity”).
But the new approach – if I stick with this – will be broader. More philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, semiological, theoretical and – with luck – also practical. At least when it comes to my marketing day job.
How are opinions and ideas shaped? How are minds influenced? Why do people believe what they believe?
At this time of widespread and outright denial of seemingly undeniable evidence and facts – the politicisation of actuality, if you will – much what we have assumed about the post-Enlightenment rise of rationality and evidence-led decision-making has been shown to have been mistaken.
Postmodernist concepts of meaning and reality have become the norm – ironically adopted and most successfully pushed by the right-wingers who have long argued against most postmodern conceptions of the world. Barthes’ idea of the death of the author has spread to the point that the *intention* behind any given statement is no longer seen as quite as important as the *interpretation* of that statement by any number of diverse audiences, creating outrage and confusion across the political spectrum.
Structuralism is similarly on the rise as a way of interpreting the world around us – most notably in a growing awareness of deep structural inequalities for women and minorities – leading to a renewed surge of Deconstructionism as these systems are analysed and explained in an effort to reshape society.
All this is reshaping the norms of how we see the world. Which means a return to the old texts of my university days seems overdue – and this time with more attention than I spent in the rapid skimming for essays on Barthes, Derrida, Saussure, Lacan and more during the theory part of my MA, now half-forgotten from some 20 years ago.
These ideas are complex – to unpack them requires heavy reliance on some of the most difficult theorists of the 20th century – so require a lot of the reading, weighing and considering that Bacon advocates.
And as I know from my past forays into blogging, to shape my currently half-formed ideas will also require more writing, *for myself* than I’ve done in a decade.
This is a start.
I’ll get much wrong along the way. Some of my ideas will seem naive to those who know more, wrong to those with different opinions, and pretentious to many (inevitable as soon as you start on theory).
But, for now, I’m not entirely sure what my opinions really are – except that I believe I need to read and write more to fully form them. And as this blog section of my old dust-covered personal site still exists – a legacy of my freelancing days that desperately needs a back- and front-end refresh – I may as well use it.
Should you find these musings, you’re welcome to read and comment as you see fit, but – just like in the early days of blogging – I’ll be writing here primarily for myself.
A strange book, hinting at some of Rushdie’s later brilliance, but not anywhere near as clever or profound as it seems to think it is.
This quote, from page 141, just as you start to wonder what the point of it all is, pretty much sums up the book:
“I do not care for stories that are so, so tight. Stories should be like life, slightly frayed at the edges, full of loose ends and lives juxtaposed by accident rather than some grand design. Most of life has no meaning – so it must surely be a distortion of life to tell tales in which every single element is meaningful… How terrible to have to see a meaning or a great import in everything around one, everything one does, everything that happens to one!”
Very readably written (hence the extra star and bothering to finish it), but for a 700-page character study it’s impressive just how shallow all the characters are.
Every single one – from the principles to the supporting cast – has one defining characteristic, and one only. There’s so little complexity or depth they may as well all be described as deeply as the two characters known throughout only as “black Henry Young” and “Asian Henry Young”.
There’s Withdrawn Trauma, our hero – the life of the title – defined purely by his childhood abuse, and still acting like a child decades later. Selfish, closed-minded, suspicious. Worthy of pity, certainly – but it’s hard to see why so many other characters deem him worthy of so much loyalty for so long, in the face of so much predictable nonsense. Normally after spending 700 pages with a character you empathise with them. Not this guy, despite having winced through scene upon scene of abuse and suffering.
There’s the three friends, Compassion (who, at least, briefly shows signs of developing some complexity where Compassion briefly turns to Conflicted), Obvious Unrequited Secret Admirer, and Architect (supposedly one of the core group of four friends at the heart of the story, but with no personality beyond his career).
There’s also Ineffective Father-figure, always wanting to help but never quite knowing how. There’s Doctor, who inexplicably keeps staying on call 24/7 – unpaid too, in America! – for one of the most difficult, selfish patients anyone could ever hope not to encounter. And then there’s Violent Rapist, Manipulative Rapist, Psycho Rapist, and a succession of other anonymous rapists undeserving of description.
And it’s still astonishing, 700 pages later, that a woman was able to write such a long novel without a single substantive female character.
Plus, it’s incredibly predictable. In the final quarter I found myself actively laughing as it unfolded, because everything was so obvious. No surprises at all.
But worst of all, this is a novel that exists to smother the concept of hope for change and redemption. To confirm the worst suspicions of the traumatised and suicidal. To encourage the suicidal to go through with it. It’s repeated message is that things don’t get better – at least, not for long. It’s Keynes’ “In the long run we’re all dead” in brutal, unforgiving, waffling novel form.
It contains nothing positive, says nothing new or substantive, is packed with stereotypes, and, considering the subject matter, is deeply irresponsible.
An odd book, but very readable. Mini biographies of various leading economists of the last couple of hundred years are a mostly useful way to build the central argument: Economic ideas are a product of their time, and of their creators’ circumstances. It’s a fair argument, and one likely borne out by the fact I’m leaving this much more sympathetic to the ideas of Amartya Sen than any other person featured. He’s the only economist covered who’s still alive…
But this book is odd mostly due to its choices for who to include – and who to omit.
It starts by scene-setting with Dickens, then progresses straight to Marx and Engels, rather than going slightly further back to include Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and other earlier economists.
It’s heavily focused on British/American/Austrian thinkers to the exclusion of pretty much any others – and doesn’t include any non-Western economists other than Sen. Hell, it doesn’t even include any French economists.
The main contention other than everything progresses (it’s largely teleological in approach) is that everyone’s a Keynesian – even people you don’t think are Keynesian. Keynes hangs over the entire book, from long before he appears.
There’s a good case for this – I mean, Keynes is Keynes – but considering the general argument is that economics has been getting increasingly sophisticated, it seems odd that it largely (and rapidly) tails off in its interest in the aftermath of WWII (and, perhaps not coincidentally, Keynes’ death).
The most surprising omission, considering there’s a strong undercurrent of concern with human welfare throughout, is any reference to behavioural economics – surely one of the most fundamental shifts in approach to the discipline in the last 50-60 years.
Nor is there any coverage of the birth of game theory – arguably one of the most influential (and abused) concepts of the same period. This last is particularly surprising given the frequent use of the term “zero sum game” in latter chapters – and by the fact that the author’s previous best-known book was a biography of John Nash.
So yes, an odd book as much for its omissions as its inclusions. But engaging, readable, and (mostly) relatable. In that, it does what it set out to do – help you to understand not just *what* ideas economists had, but *why* they had them.
Parts of this were very good, and the writing mostly flows well. Parts were a bit confused – or confusing, or both.
Some characters are fully fleshed out, with clear story arcs that make sense. Most flit in and out with little clear purpose beyond serving as an excuse to explore some aspect of Zambian life.
All this is fine enough, as it goes, as the whole book is effectively a montage of snapshots of loosely intertwined lives designed to give a sense of the country’s own confused identity – but it’s a montage building to something that feels unfinished.
Unless that’s the point – which, in part, I think it is. But if so it’s a bit frustrating for the reader who’s just invested all that time reading the best part of 600 pages, even if it may well be thematically appropriate.
Using the Christmas break to catch up on a backlog of reading, and this passage on how reading inspires creativity (because innovative ideas are usually derivatives with enhancements) is the perfect reminder of why I should do this more often:
“When you read you might hear voices of the dead that make your hair stand on end, or that trigger in you a thought analogous to the founding thought and prompt you to write a response that grows from the times you live in, and differs from the earlier text simply because times and thinking and words have changed… You may see new things in the earlier text, and so give something back to it.”
Want to be more creative in the new year? Read more. Watch more. Listen more. Consume more. Because the greater the range of sources of inspiration you expose yourself to, the more varied and interesting your output.
Do “what the best poets do, trying to think *behind* the words… whether those words come from a newspaper, from an essay, from a hubbub on the street…”
A good new year’s resolution, that: Think *behind* the words.
A postmodern, magic realist extended analogy about efforts to recover a pre-colonial sense of identity and belonging? Yes. Very much yes.
Brutal in places, though, as I suppose should be expected from a book that opens with a murder and that revolves around a curse – but that magical element is more subtle for the most part. It’s more a McGuffin than central, and the book more realist than magic realist for the most part.
The true centrality is instead Uganda itself – a country invented by outsiders who couldn’t pronounce its name, torn apart and warily trying to put itself back together while trying to avoid having to look too closely at its past.
So many very well thought-through metaphors, many of which I’m sure I’ve missed in my ignorance – but a superbly constructed and considered book.
To help shape my thinking, I write essays and shorter notes examining the ideas and narratives that shape media, marketing, technology and culture.
A core focus: The way context and assumptions can radically change how ideas are interpreted. Much of modern business, marketing, and media thinking is built on other people's frameworks, models, theories, and received wisdom. This can help clarify complex problems – but as ideas travel between disciplines and organisations they are often simplified, misapplied or treated as universal truths. I'm digging into these, across the following categories - the first being a catch-all for shorter thoughts:
In Japanese, the word for alcohol is sake – which is fairly familiar to English speakers as Japanese rice wine. Ask for sake in a Japanese bar (at least, if you’re obviously not Japanese, like me), and that’s what’ll be delivered, even though the word technically means all types of alcohol.
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