Coddiwompling into 2024
Happy new year, friends!
Welcome to issue seventy three of Manufacturing Serendipity, a loosely connected, somewhat rambling collection of the unexpected things I’ve recently encountered.
This newsletter is free to receive, but expensive to make :)
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Before we get into this thing properly, here’s a little shameless self-promotion:
Final Call!
Ideation for Digital PR Live Workshop Ticket Sales Close on 16th January…
I’ll be closing ticket sales for my Ideation for Digital PR course at midnight (UK time) on Tuesday 16th January. If you’d like to join me for this series of four workshops, delivered over Zoom, you’ve got until then to get yourself a ticket. Full course details can be found here, and you can book your spot here.
Tickets are just £240* and are on sale now :)
PLUS: get 10% off tickets by using the promo code HANNAH.
*Prices quoted exclude Eventbrite fees.
Right then my loves, grab yourself a suitable beverage and let’s do this thing…
Part I: Things I’ve Been Thinking About
So… how are you doing? Have you made resolutions, or set intentions, or thought about your goals and grand plans for 2024?
If you have, that’s great and I love that for you :)
But if you haven’t, and are feeling kinda shitty about yourself then you might like to check out this love letter to myself and everyone else who feels tyrannised by the Gregorian calendar: IT’S A NEW YEAR, AND I’M NOT READY.
Remember friends, calendars are just social constructs, and the “new year” can begin whenever the hell you choose.
Also, as and when you do feel like you might be ready for the “new year” to begin, you might like to try out one or two of Austin Kleon’s prompt exercises, and/or check out this approach to setting your intentions.
Moar serendipitous finds:
A team of data scientists (Ethan Zuckerman, Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, Rebecca Curran, and Jason Baumgartner) have devised a method of coding which essentially “drunk dials” YouTube in order to collect a random sample of videos.
The potential opportunities for the analysis of this dataset are huge (check out this introduction to the initial takeaways); plus, it’s also allowed the team to estimate the size of YouTube — over 13 billion videos!
“Although nearly everyone can identify syllables, almost nobody can define them. Phonetics is the kind of linguistics which studies the sound of human speech. According to Ladefoged, it is "curiously difficult" for experts to come up with "an objective phonetic procedure for locating the number of syllables in a word or a phrase in any language." Phonologists, who study the way that sounds are organised in language, have also attacked the problem of the syllable. These two types of linguists have slightly different aims. The phoneticist wants to describe what exactly goes on in your speech organs when a syllable happens. The phonologist wants to come up with a formal, fixed definition of exactly what the syllable is as a part of language.
Both kinds of linguists have to deal with some strange problems from the outset when studying the syllable. They feel obvious, but people differ quite widely in their intuitive definition of what they actually are. You and I and Shakespeare know that verse metre is based on syllable counts, so we've certainly come up with reliable rules for controlling big groups of them. Word by word, however, we haven't.
Ladefoged explains that he would say that the word predatory has three syllables, but other people would count four. He also cites bottling and brightening as words that can be pronounced as two syllables, or with with syllabic consonants in the middle, so that they have three syllables. Then there are the words that everybody pronounces the same, but whose syllable-counts are open to debate. For example, in a word like communism, is that final "m" syllabic or not?
Are words containing what linguists call high front vowels followed by /l/ (eg: meal, seal, real) two syllables or one? What about words with /r/, like hire, fire, hour? In words containing unstressed high vowels (where your tongue sits near the roof of your mouth) followed by another vowel without an intervening consonant, eg; mediate, heavier, neolithic, do the vowels form a dipthong (two vowels gliding together) made of one syllable, or two?”
I found this fascinating. Also, (I think) it goes some way to explaining why I find it so difficult to count syllables in poetry — for example, I’ll count the syllables in a line three times, and come up with three different answers. I suspect that my own speech is inconsistent — i.e. sometimes I’ll pronounce a word like “fire” as one syllable, other times, I’ll pronounce it as two syllables.
How people from different countries laugh online
“In person, laughter is universal. No matter what language you speak, almost anyone can understand the meaning of a mischievous giggle, sarcastic snort, or an infectious belly laugh. But it isn’t quite as simple when it comes to writing it down, especially in the era of social media and messaging apps.
Most English speakers are familiar with the nuances of when to say haha, lol, or lmao — each conveying a different weight to laughter. Other languages have their own specific terminology, some of which may not be immediately obvious even when translated.
Take Japanese, for instance. “Warau” is one way to express laughter. Some shortened that to just the first sound of the word, “w.” Others then noticed that “www” looked like blades of grass, leading people to start using the Japanese word for grass (草) to represent laughter. That continual evolution is why, if you want to write about laughing hard in Japanese, you could type 大草原: “giant grass field.”
Or there’s “askfhsjkd,” used in Turkish. No acronyms or wordplay here — keyboard spam is actually a popular way to indicate amusement among young Turkish speakers, as if they’ve been overcome by laughter and are unable to type complete words.
These are just a small fraction of the many ways people around the world represent laughter, from a little Nepali giggle — khit khit — to an explosion of laughter in Nigerian Pidgin: lwkmd, or “laugh wan kill me die.”
Since when does US Vogue hate text?
Jess Carr explores Vogue US’ move towards minimal text on their magazine covers:
“As a child of the 2000s, I am no stranger to the symphony of clickbait text—cover lines in editorial parlance—that used to adorn fashion magazines. But, as of late I’ve been noticing a distinct lack of text on covers. It was Rihanna’s May 2022 cover that really got my goat going. On the surface, it was like many Vogue covers, complete with the signature masthead at the top and an Annie Leibovitz lensed portrait. But the only text on the cover (other than the Vogue masthead) read, “Oh, Baby! Rihanna’s Plus One.”
5 words. 29 characters.
Appalling. Where had all the flashy text in mismatched type, size, weight, and colour gone? I was immediately set in motion to unearth the lost art of textual exuberance.”
Discovered via The Pudding’s 2023 picks for the best visual and data-driven stories which is also worth checking out if that’s your jam.
Spanish Surrealist Remedios Varo
“Alchemy and the depths of the occult manifest within Remedios Varo’s practice. The Spanish surrealist (1908-1963), whose works are on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, was a researcher at heart with a vast, insatiable curiosity for discovering the unseen and underrecognized. Interested in scientific disciplines like astronomy and ecology along with psychology, tarot, and feminism, Varo was intent on expanding the limits of human perception. “I deliberately set out to make a mystical work, in the sense of revealing a mystery, or better, of expressing it through ways that do not always correspond to the logical order, but to an intuitive, divinatory, and irrational order,” she’s quoted as saying.”
Part II: Books I’m Reading Right Now
I read a bunch of books over the Christmas period (some I loved, others not so much); here’s a handful that I’d recommend:
Shy, Max Porter — a beautifully-written fever dream of a novel which I devoured in one sitting.
Brick Lane Bookshop: New Short Stories 2023 — twelve short stories from the Brick Lane Bookshop’s 2023 short story prize, including one story written by my wonderful friend Jane. Get your copy here.
Everything is Teeth, Evie Wyld & Joe Sumner — a stunning graphic novel memoir about Wyld’s shark-obsessed childhood.
Part III: Things I’ve Been Watching
Here are some things I’ve recently watched:
Hidden Figures, Disney+ — this story of the African-American women mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program is absolutely brilliant.
Saltburn, Amazon Prime — Ugh. I still don’t know what to think about this movie and honestly I’m not sure it even matters. It is a great looking film that’s either stupid in a good way, or stupid in a bad way. It has many plot problems, it doesn’t quite hang together, and I’m not sure it really knows what it’s actually trying to be. There are brilliant moments, but then there are also some pointless gross-out moments which make me think that maybe it’s just (a somewhat evolved) version of American Pie for posh people. Watch it, or don’t — you do you, my loves.
The Tourist: Season 2, BBC iPlayer — I really wanted this to be as good as Season 1, but honestly, it just isn’t. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed it, and I think if you like your thrillers to be twisty-turny, and darkly comic, this is worth watching.
Murder is Easy, BBC iPlayer — this was… ok I guess? An Agatha Christie murder mystery is a UK Christmas staple, and I liked this updated adaptation. Good Sunday afternoon viewing.
Part IV: What I’ve been up to…
Christmas was lovely and it flew by. I ate a lot of delicious food and got many wonderful pressies.
What’s next?
I am excited about:
Running my ideation course
Attending this writing workshop
Making plans for this year
Playing with the lego, and reading the many lovely books I got for Christmas
Meeting up with my friends
That’s all from me for now :)
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Big love,
Hannah x
PS Wanna find out more about me and my work? Head over to Worderist.com