Peggy Noonan to Silicon Valley: cut out the silly names
At the end of an otherwise reasonable column about the Iranian uprising Peggy Noonan went off the deep end again yesterday. First she unleashed her inner Edmund Burke, dialing the Wayback Machine to the 1790s to try to reimagine the excesses of the French Revolution ricocheting around the world via Twitter. She asks, “Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to continue his blithe indifference if reports of France grimly murdering France had been Twittered out each day?” Hey, Tom — forget about the allies who just helped you win independence. Never mind your own revolutionary experience. Disavow those tumbrels!
This spasm of Noonanity is immediately followed by another, even sillier one, an observation on the inconsiderate naming habits of technological innovators:
The great question is what modern technology can do not in the short term so much as the long. It is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?
That’s right, Sergei and Larry, Ev and Biz, Zuckerberg et al: Listen to your old aunt Peggy. Stop making fools of yourselves. Every time you give one of your companies a wacky name, you are sabotaging the gravitas of pundits everywhere. Just stop it, kids, now: you’re making the talking heads look silly!
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June 21st, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Wow.. this from one of Reagan’s top spin-meisters… the people who majored in saying silly things (ketchup is a vegetable, trees cause pollution, etc, ad nauseam, ad infinitum) and justified law breaking only matched by Bush the Younger.. gotta say one thing for ole’ meg.. she’s got chutzpah.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Well, Twitter I can see a little bit, but it’s not like it’s a made up word. Does Noonan just hate onomatopoeia? Facebook doesn’t sound particularly childish either. From what I remember, off the web, a facebook is a sort of who’s who filled with pictures so new people can familiarize themselves in a new environment. And surely even Peggy Noonan knows that Google is based off the number googol, which is 10^100, or 1 with a hundred zeros behind it. Right? I don’t know about you, but advanced number theory tends to carry plenty of gravitas for me.
In any case, what does she suggest as alternatives? ShortBlog? SiteWithRandomInfoAboutMe? SearchStuff?
June 26th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Let’s see – Exxon? Nabisco? Rexall? Kmart? Schering Plough? Knight Ridder? Xerox? Alcoa? Boeing? I dunna understand the issue? Does she have writers block? Nothing interesting to say today?
She just can’t bear to say “I tweeted about that to my peeps today . . . .” Ghod, who would want to say than in any case! Gotta agree with her there.
July 5th, 2009 at 1:36 am
NOONAN!
July 26th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
[...] discoveries not uncommon in the blogosphere. I liked his take on things, e.g. this recent short post about Peggy Noonan’s objection to silly Web 2.0 names. Following the progress of his work on a book he said he was writing about blogging, I didn’t [...]