I attended a mysteriously vague talk at The Interval here in San Francisco where two artists pretended to be from The Bureau of Linguistical Reality. With $0 of promotion, they've been featured in the The New Yorker, Smithsonian, NYT, et al., and there's something in there all of us in marketing can learn. When you start with a truly good idea, it can travel on its own.
The bit: For 10 years now two linguists have sustianed a hoax. They dress in uniforms, table public events, and pose as an obscure government bureau that rules on matters of language. They ask passerbys to describe how they feel about a topic like climate change. Said passerbys inevitably struggle. Often, there are no perfect words for their feelings. So these two prompt them to invent new ones—stuff that actually kinda sorta works, like “gwilt” or “slowpocalypse.”
It teaches people that language isn’t some unalterable property of the universe. We made it up. And we can make remake it.
