Writing Boots

While the world watches Beijing this summer during the Olympics, writers and other communication nerds should keep an ear out for language. Or, at least, an era.

I traveled in China three summers ago, and came across hilarious typos—the bedroom slippers at the tall, shiny New Era Hotel in Kunming read, "New Ear Hotel"—and infinite other boners. An urban cafe boasted in big letters, “Fabulous Food and Coffee All by the Here.”

There was also some good propaganda. A sign in a smoke-choked steel town:

Gao Gao Xing Zing Shang Ban
Ping Ping An An Hui Jia

Translation:

Happy, Happy, Go to Work.
Return Home With Equanimity

But the most confounding difference between Chinese communication and Western writing is in their opposite attitude toward clichés. While Western writers are discouraged from larding up their prose with familiar phrases, using familiar idioms is a sign of mastery in China.

Our government tour guide in the Southwestern town of Lijiang spoke clear English, but unwittingly had the group chuckling as he referred to his wife as “my better half,” his 93-year-old grandmother as “no spring chicken,” the local police as “stuffed shirts,” disastrous and deadly summer flooding in China as “par for the course” and hotel prices as “highway robbery” (because “you pay through the nose”). Upon leaving the tour group one evening in LiJiang, he told one member of our group to “sleep like a log” and another to “sleep tight, and don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

This tour guide clung to his English idioms like a drunk to a lamppost!

I have read reports that China actually hired a fleet of copyeditors to clean up Beijing. But I, for one, am going to be on the lookout for the ridiculous, the hilarious and the unintentionally wise phrases, like the sign the U.S. women’s soccer team took as a motto during their trip to China several years ago:

"Don’t use panic."

You can look high and low in the corporate communication world today and for the first time in four decades you won’t find Dan Danbom, the writer who, as he wrote humor columns for local newspapers and PR trades over the years,  served as a communication manager and speechwriter in various outfits in and around his hometown of Denver.

He’s chucked it and started an Internet-based antique book store, which you can see at www.abebooks.com.

"I named my business Danbom & Son in memory of my dad, Ray," Danbom told friends in announcing his new venture. "We spent a lot of happy hours together looking for books. He always wondered aloud if I might to into the used book business when I retired. I told him I was probably too smart to do something like that."

No longer so ego-laden after years as a speechwriter—a job, he once quipped, that involved following executives’ orders to "write down my ideas as if I had them"—Danbom is free to "do some freelance work, indifferently" and also "more fun and more important things. Like working on the Obama campaign."

Dan Danbom kept this business in perspective and never let an absurdity go by. Not that he didn’t work hard at communication. He actually got his "ABC" certification from the International Association of Business Communicators. But later he was forced to concede that the the only effect it ever had was that occasionally someone would misread his nametag at an industry meeting and call him "Mr. Abick."

No more. "I was in the grocery store today, and who did I see but a former boss—a particularly stark example of the sort of blustering idiot who passes for an executive these days," Danbom wrote me yesterday. "I decided that should he speak to me, I would pretend not to know who he was."

Godspeed, Mr. Abick. And keep in touch.