lexicon

Yesterday we were intrigued and slightly befuddled to read on our sister mediabistro.com blog FishbowlNY of Backpacker magazine editor-in-chief Jonathan Dorn's description of recent work on the magazine's website: "Since last September, we have been architecting what our readers said they wanted: more multimedia content, GPS-enabled hikes, current gear reviews, and loads of interactive trip tools." While "GPS-enabled hikes" sound like something we'd like to try, we had trouble getting past Dorn's use of the verb "to architect" when describing web design. To get a better handle on the verb, we looked to that dictionary of dictionaries, that settler of many a lexical cage match, the Oxford English Dictionary. Here's what it had to say under architect, v.

To design (a building). Also transf. and fig. Hence architected ppl. a., designed by an architect; architecting vbl. n. and ppl. a.

We had a lot of trouble in architecture "school." A real lack of consistent--not to mention clear--linguistic sensibility. Half the professors kept on using phrases like post-matricial deconstruction of the pre-planar strata while the other half discussed body, mesh, and the body mesh. If only we'd had the recently launched Graphic Design Glossary to help us out, we might have had a bit more luck when we were asked to choke the raster on the 300dpi keyline and save to jpg. To think, if we'd only had the glossary, we could be junior assistant assistant architecting. For shame.

Thwart Design has come up with a list of Hip Design Jargon and filed it, appropriately, under pet peeves. Highlights include: synergy (an old favorite of mine from Disney days), modular, sustainable, and organic.

Here is a bit of signage related arcana I stumbled across while looking for an online justification for my preferred use of the word snipes to describe posters wheat-pasted up around town. I use it for both advertisements and posters of the street art variety. It was a term I learned years ago, when I was invited out for a night of sniping with the art-scene feminists, The Guerilla Girls. It seemed at the time (and still) the perfect word to describe these posters that appear so surreptitiously.

My search included strings like "+snipes +advertising" (which got me a lot of links to advertising for movies starring Wesley Snipes) and +snipes +"guerilla marketing" led me to dead ends. Finally the query "+snipes +advertising +poster" led me to this Glossary entitled Lexicon of Terms Commonly Used in Outdoor Advertising brought to us by the fine people at...The Outdoor Advertising Association of the Philippines, naturally. I just love the internet.

Now that I've had my verbiage validated by someone in the Philippines, I'll get back to work on my upcoming post about a curious series of snipes I've been seeing on the streets of NYC lately. Stay tuned.

To view a full size image of the Guerilla Girls snipe pictured at left, click here.