Save the Words: Linguistic Intervention

Adoption drives, endangered literary species, and how to nerd your way to the latest buzzword.

We’re obsessed with words. Unfortunately, more than half of the world’s 6,800 or so languages?are expected to disappear before the century is over. While English may be missing from the book of endangered linguistic species, in the age of social media shorthand and vowelless acronyms, the average English speaker’s eloquence, linguistic dexterity and breadth of vocabulary is rapidly declining. Today, 90% of what we write is communicated using just 7,000 of the quarter-million words in the English language, a mere one-third of one percent.

Save the Words is a delightful language conservation effort from the makers of the Oxford English dictionary, the complete compendium of every word that ever existed in English. Driven by the simple insight that the best way to keep a word from dying is to use it often enough, the site offers a virtual wall of endangered lexemes that you’re invited to adopt, complete with playful sound effects as you hover over a word and it scrambles to grab your attention and get you to pick it.

Whether you’re a seplasiary (n. seller or producer of perfumes and ointments) or an Agonyclite (n. member of a religious sect that stood rather than kneeled), let’s face it — you could use a linguistic botox shot, rejuvenating your lexicon with a healthy dose of forgotten lingo. You can also sign up for a word-of-the-day email, delivering a daily new word fresh-packed in Oxford each morning.

The one downfall: The Flash-based design makes deep-linking impossible and individual words unsharable — yet another tragic missed opportunity from the sexy-over-shareable department.

Save the Words reminds us of lexicographer Erin McKean’s wonderful Wordnik, with a touch of Free Rice playfulness and a quirky twist. And if you play your cards right, you may even excavate a lexic gem to bring back as a hip new buzzword or, at the very least, a catchy Twitter hashtag.

via VSL

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4Food: Dejunking Fast Food for the Digital Age

Holes that fill a market gap, or what the iPad has to do with taking down Monsanto.

We all know the story — fast food is awful for us, dreadful for the environment, and one of modernity’s most gruesome addictions. Yet in a culture of constantly shrinking time budgets and an ever-increasing marketability of convenience, it’s increasingly difficult to reconcile our moral and nutritional ideals with our fast-paced workaholism. But it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation, at least not if it’s up to 4food — an innovative restaurant concept aiming to de-junk fast food for the digital age.

Founded by British serial entrepreneur and ex-music-exec Adam Kidron, former CEO of Urban Box Office, and rock musician Michael Shuman, 4food is equal parts good food and digital age fixtures. Not only are orders placed through iPad-based “Dynamic Menu Boards” or pre-ordered online, but they’re also fully customizable to your lifestyle and nutrition goals. The entire operation is designed with sustainability and ethical conduct at its core — from the local, organic, Monsanto-unaffiliated ingredients to the fairtrade worker compensation to the in-store recycling and composting programs.

We bring fast food that’s fresh, delicious, and nutritious to all ages, lifestyles, incomes, and ethnicities. No fads, fillers, or anything artificial. We’re revolutionizing counter culture, in real-time.”

The restaurant’s signature product is the W(hole)burger™ — a donut-shaped beef, lamb, pork, turkey, veggie, salmon or egg patty, paired with one of 25 ethnically and nutritionally diverse Veggiescoop centers, each with unique nutritional attributes. The “holes” from the patties are made into skewers for a perfect bunless, low-carb, shareable meal.

4food’s manifesto is a fantastic epitome of what every eatery should aspire to do and be:

• De-junked fast food is made of quality, natural ingredients and customizable to your taste and nutrition goals.
• Our foods don’t contain any hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fats or oils.
• No artificial sweeteners. No preservatives. No artificial flavor enhancers.
• None of our food is fried.
• If it’s soy, it’s not Monsanto* — wherever possible we purchase whole ingredients that have neither been genetically engineered nor modified.
• Our chefs use simple and straightforward cooking techniques to prepare and cook your food to order.
• Our cows, pigs, and sheep are humanely raised while grazing and eating vegetarian diets.
• Our poultry and fish are fed heritage foods with no artificial growth hormones or antibiotics.
• You know (because we tell you) where all of our ingredients come from.
• We provide personalized nutrition facts, advice, and menu recommendations every day in—store, at www.4food.com, and printed on every receipt.
• We charge reasonable prices, when the rights of farm workers to earn a living wage, the integrity of our food preparation, and the quality of our ingredients are taken into account.
• Your purchases provide real world job training to individuals transitioning back into the work force—to earn more than minimum wage.
• We compost in-store and recycle. We employ sunscreen systems, LED lighting, and purchase renewable energy credits from alternative energy generators. We’re committed to increasing our use of sustainable power as we grow.
• We incentivize you to market your custom W(hole)burgers™ online, so that we don’t have to. The money we save on marketing enables us to purchase better quality ingredients and keep our prices down.

4food is part Apple store, part European coffeehouse, part Michael Pollan’s wet dream. The first restaurant opens its doors at 40th & Madison in New York on September 7.

via Creativity Online

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