That Which We Call a Rose

“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?  Four.  Calling a tail a leg, doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln

But political rhetoric would have you believe that it is not a tail but a leg.  It’s time to apply the potent laxative of logic to constipated political spin.  Your life (freedom) depends on it.  Skeptical?  Read on.

The political correctness movement was not the beginning of linguistic spin intended to get you to first believe, then to swear that the excrement you consume is really organic delicacy.  The un-duped would say, “Eh Gad, Man.  You are eating a steaming pile of dog feces!” but if you dupe enough people over enough time, dogs become the world’s most important commodity and Mastiffs the greatest breed.

Dung devourer creation is profitable enterprise.  Solitarily standing in the way of obscene windfall is a skeptical populace armed with logic and motivated by freedom.  Linguistic codification, the marketing wing at Excrement Eaters Unlimited, enjoys a remarkable history of obscene profits and of death and debauchery desensitization.

Spin Tutorial

Spin takes on several forms. The two most popular are Euphemisms and Dyseuphemisms. When there is an attempt to make a word or idea sound better than it is, a euphemism is created. The opposite is true for a dyseuphemism. Here are some examples:

Insect Extermination

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn makes the case that post revolution communists co-opted euphemistic phraseology to disguise a reality that would have ensured an early end to both empire and existence for Lenin groupies.  Here are some examples:

Euphemism:  Pacification

Reality:  Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets.  If people cause trouble, you can create peace by getting rid of them.

Euphemism: Transfer of Population or Rectification of Frontiers

Reality: Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry.

Euphemism: Elimination of Unreliable Elements

Reality: People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of Scurvy in Arctic labor camps.

Solzhenitsyn painstakingly documents several other euphemistic reality incursions.  “Thus the death penalty was rechristened ‘the supreme measure’ — no longer a punishment, but a means of social defense. (Gulag pg 436) In 1927, the benevolent Russian Central Committee abolished capital punishment except for crimes against the state and army, including “banditry.”  In time, the revealed reality was that “every armed nationalist who doesn’t agree with the central government is a ‘bandit,’ ” and, similarly, “any participant in an urban rebellion is also a ’bandit.” (Gulag pg 436)

Lenin expressed his sinister intent from the beginning when he said, we must go about “purging the land of all kinds of harmful insects.” The “insect” classification grew progressively larger.

“Insects” included not only all class enemies but also “workers malingering at their work.” George Douglas of the Foundation for Economic Education said, “It is not possible for us at this time to fully investigate exactly who fell within the broad definition of insects; the population of Russia was too heterogeneous and encompassed small, special groups, entirely superfluous and, today, forgotten. The people in the local zemstvo self-governing bodies were, of course, insects. People in the cooperative movement were also insects, as were all owners of their own homes. There were not a few insects among the teachers in the gymnasiums. The church parish councils were made up almost exclusively of insects, and it was insects of course who sang in church choirs. All priests were insects — and monks and nuns were even more so. (Gulag pg 27 -28)”

So far, political attempts at euphemization in the United States have not been as toxic as they were in Russia in 1927.  George Orwell is erroneously credited with originating the term Doublespeak from his book, 1984, in which the term never appears.  Regardless, Doublespeak refers to Euphemism and Dyseuphemism.  Doublespeak examples span all levels of comedy and severity.  Both sides of the political spectrum employ Doublespeak for rhetorical advantage.  But before dung-heap diving, peruse Doublespeak’s lighter side:

Euphemisms for someone who has died:

passed on, checked out, bit the big one, kicked the bucket, bitten the dust, popped their clogs, pegged it, carked it, turned their toes up, bought the farm, cashed in their chips, fallen off their perch, croaked, given up the ghost, shuffled off this mortal coil, assumed room temperature.


On the heavier side, politicians are notorious Doublespeakers, yet both are pot and kettle.  Consider, first, the liberal point of view:

Doublespeak:  Abortion

Real meaning:  Killing and removal of a human fetus from its mother’s womb.

Doublespeak:  Affirmative action

Real meaning:  An attempt to achieve equality of outcome by favoring women and non-white males.

Doublespeak:  Working Americans

Real meaning:  Non-professionals who may or may not work harder than professionals and other wealthy people, and probably have invested less in schooling and training than professionals but should view themselves as oppressed by lazy, greedy professionals and entrepreneurs and vote for their liberal advocates.

Doublespeak:  Community organizing

Real meaning:  Do whatever you can, including lie, miscount, cheat, fudge and threaten, to give your group more than one vote per person (See Acorn).

Doublespeak:  Affordable Healthcare

Real meaning:  Shifting healthcare costs away from near-term voters and burdening the next two or three generations.

Doublespeak: Social Justice

Real meaning: Using the word “justice” implies that subsidy is deserved as a matter of justice. Therefore, the taking from one and giving it to another is authorized by morality and law and should not be questioned. Socialism.

Doublespeak: Planned Parenthood

Real Meaning: Promote abortion and undermine traditional families.

And on the conservative side,

Doublespeak: Strong National Defense

Real meaning: Meddle in world affairs, in campaigns with dubious gains and huge loss of fortune and life.

Doublespeak: Neo-conservatism

Real Meaning: Dupe the base, pacify the independents and get some libs to believe that you will somehow spend money like a drunken sailor and still ensure prosperity.

Doublespeak: Operation Iraqi Freedom

Real Meaning: Wow, no WMD’s. Let’s re-brand the war to be about freedom and not defense.

Please add some of your own in the comment section. I love ‘em. If I were a doublespeak consultant, I would advise the following…

The NEA (National Teacher’s Union) should change its name to, “Society to Protect the Future of America’s Children.” Any critic would be going up against three sacred untouchables, Children, America and Future.

The Communist Party should change its name to, “The American Institute for the Promotion of Compassion.”

Truly the emperor is naked no matter what you hear from congress, Hollywood and the media. Calling a thing by its name has liberating power in thought and action.

With the exception of comedic and artful uses, if doublespeak is not confronted, it will get passed off as reality. When this happens, life, freedom and goodness are sacrificed. Solzhenitsyn says of most of his countrymen who allowed Lenin to exist and thrive, they “didn’t love freedom enough” to fight for it from the beginning.

If you choose not to engage, the question becomes, “how would you like your excrement served, madam?”

So, you want to start an internet business…

I got a call from my dentist a few months ago asking for an appointment. He had heard from another patient that I had some small business expertise and wanted to improve his business. To his credit, he saw his practice as a business and actively looked for ways to improve his revenue, efficiency and profitability. I always thought it would be cool to set up an education forum just outside a dental school campus and offer classes on small business essentials. Every dentist that I have polled has said that, looking back, they would have spent a small fortune to learn in advance what business hard knocks had taught them over the years.

My dentist arrived just after lunch on a Friday. After the customary exchange of pleasantries, he got right to the point.

“Here is my problem. I am not number one on a google search. I am number two.”

He meant that if a potential customer were to type in “(his city) dentist,” google would display several pages. Being ranked number one, or being the first, non-paid google entry can be valuable. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) amateurs generally assume that a number one ranking is automatically worth the time and money it would take to achieve.

Statistically (averaged), you will see, the following click distribution for respective ranking:

Position #1:  45.5% of all clicks

Position #2:  15.7% of all clicks

Position #3:  10% of all clicks

Position #4:  5.5% of all clicks

Position #5:  5.0% of all clicks

My friend believed that by getting from #2 to #1, he would see %30 more clicks that would result in more patient visits and therefore, more money.  Makes sense, right?

Wrong

When I asked him why he wanted to be #1, he looked at me as though I had asked him what was so good about electricity.  ”#1 is better, right?” he asked.

I explained the percentages and click domination above which solidified, in his mind, his resolve to get to #1 until I said, “so you will see, on average 30% more search engine generated traffic to your site at #1, but 30% of zero is still zero.  we need to see how many people are actually searching for a dentist in your town on the internet.”  He had not considered that and asked how we could find out.

There are several tools available, my favorite is www.seobook.com.  You will need to register to access the good stuff on the site.  If you go to tools, then to keyword search tool, you will find a glorious database of searchable searches on the major search engines.  If you are like me, you will spend a lot of time testing theories and assumptions.  There is also great trending analysis, key word suggestions, etc.

The search revealed that there are exactly zero daily internet searches for dentists in his city.  To make the point clearer, I showed him a search for “New York City dentist”  The stark population difference, community characteristics and behavior, and internet capability should indicate whether or not the ‘zero’ finding was realistic.  Here is the finding.

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Given population and other differences, a local dentist is going to get an abysmal return on his investment buck by attempting SEO optimization.  Assuming that there are around 10,000 dentists in NYC, competing for a few measly clicks is a waste of time.

Without any data to fall back on, I surmised that people make dentist selections from mailers, radio adds and especially word-of-mouth referrals.  Investment into some combination of these makes more sense.  He thanked me for saving him the time and money he would have spent on SEO optimization and left.

It should be noted that there are ways to create traffic independent of SEO.  These ways will be covered in a later post.

What if there had been a large number of searches.  Is that the end of the story?  Should he invest in SEO?  There are three other questions that need to be answered.

The first is to determine market trending.  Suppose that you want to start a business that sells educational accessories to home schoolers.  After determining the interest through the key word search (10000 daily searches on average for ‘homeschool’ and ‘home school’ combined), your next step is to pull up a google trends report.  In the homeschool case, we see,

Some interesting things to note are the seasonal dips in trending during the summer months and during Thanksgiving and Christmas.  You would certainly want to create buzz during the hotter search times (more on that in a different post).  Also noteworthy is the breakdown of cities and states.  I’m really not sure how to read this, but, given the relatively small population densities, and political demographic of the states and cities listed, you are dealing with geographically concentrated groups and across the political spectrum.  That information should be useful in your marketing.

The second question to answer is, “how many sites compete in my space?”

To find this out, do a google search for your search term and look at the total number.  In the case of “home school,”  there are 7,200,000 competing sites.  Discouraged?  Don’t be.  The third question to ask is, “How good is the competition?”  for that, you will need to get into the guts of the competing websites to determine their quality (an issue for another post).

The internet can be a lucrative place to do business.  If you choose to go forward, it will require a significant time investment in staying on top of all of the changes that rock cyberworld on a regular basis.  Social Media, which we will soon explore in depth is world rocking stuff.

Please leave a comment below.  I would be interested in what you think I should cover next.