2008 Woodie Awards
Parting Words
Evan LeBon
Issue date: 11/19/04 Section: Arts & Features
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This week, Ronald Alsop of The Wall Street Journal reported the results of a recent examination of American business and its leaders' reputations. The sixth annual Reputation Quotient study, a joint effort of two market research firms, Rochester, NY-head-quartered Harris Interactive Inc. and New York City's Reputation Institute, sought to provide investors and other market contributors with helpful information regarding the ever important realm of public relations.
Alsop reported that the biggest loser in this year's study was the Walt Disney Co. The mouse - who this year is apparently a louse - did scurry under the bed without comment, however. Here's the official statement from the Eisner Empire stating that the company is: "focused on being the world's leader in quality family entertainment ... That satisfaction has translated to a tremendous uptick in financial performance for shareholders over the past few years." A ticking upwards of financial performance may be the truth in Eisner's eyes, but it seems the public relations indicators may be spelling-out quite the converse: the prospect of a dreadful downturn for Disney's dreamy image.
Up-tick & Downturn
These words - however commonly old hat they may seem to us today - are actually quite young additions to the English lexicon. This column heretofore has spent much ink on the inspection of relatively dusty words, from some of the world's oldest pages. This go around we'll take a gander at a couple of words that met their first printed light of day on the shiny pages of some of the world's leading news publications.
The OED defines up-tick thus: "An upward trend; and increase in rate." No surprise here. But to illustrate the newness of these words, we need only look in the determined direction of the diction charts. The first recorded usage of up-tick is given to the 27 April 1970 issue of Time: "The Government reported upticks in three key indicators." The term was used again in 1982, this time by The London Times: "A further up-tick in interest rates offers little encouragement to London's bulls." This was also the first recorded usage to include the hyphen (which is now the widely accepted style) presumably for greater emphasis on the "up" in the "tick." This all may seem quite elementary, but in the long history of the language, this is still quite razor's-edge.
An economically geared antonym of up-tick is, of course, downturn. The OED gives this set of words for the definition: "A turning downward; a decline, esp. in economic or business activity." An example: The U.S. has seen a recent downturn in its economy over the past months, but its shown steady progress as the up-tick of prices continues. The downturn was printed up first in 1926 by National Provisioner: "Most fat cows and heavy heifers lost around 25c and in instances the down-turn on better grades was even greater." In February of 1940, the Brits at The Economist got hold of the word (and possibly the precursor to up-tick as well): "The great upturn [of prices] was basically caused by drought, and the great downturn by the breaking of the drought."
Up-turn, down-tick, down-turn, up-tick. Whatever your preference, recent reputation results show there could be dog days for Disney's future.
Alsop reported that the biggest loser in this year's study was the Walt Disney Co. The mouse - who this year is apparently a louse - did scurry under the bed without comment, however. Here's the official statement from the Eisner Empire stating that the company is: "focused on being the world's leader in quality family entertainment ... That satisfaction has translated to a tremendous uptick in financial performance for shareholders over the past few years." A ticking upwards of financial performance may be the truth in Eisner's eyes, but it seems the public relations indicators may be spelling-out quite the converse: the prospect of a dreadful downturn for Disney's dreamy image.
Up-tick & Downturn
These words - however commonly old hat they may seem to us today - are actually quite young additions to the English lexicon. This column heretofore has spent much ink on the inspection of relatively dusty words, from some of the world's oldest pages. This go around we'll take a gander at a couple of words that met their first printed light of day on the shiny pages of some of the world's leading news publications.
The OED defines up-tick thus: "An upward trend; and increase in rate." No surprise here. But to illustrate the newness of these words, we need only look in the determined direction of the diction charts. The first recorded usage of up-tick is given to the 27 April 1970 issue of Time: "The Government reported upticks in three key indicators." The term was used again in 1982, this time by The London Times: "A further up-tick in interest rates offers little encouragement to London's bulls." This was also the first recorded usage to include the hyphen (which is now the widely accepted style) presumably for greater emphasis on the "up" in the "tick." This all may seem quite elementary, but in the long history of the language, this is still quite razor's-edge.
An economically geared antonym of up-tick is, of course, downturn. The OED gives this set of words for the definition: "A turning downward; a decline, esp. in economic or business activity." An example: The U.S. has seen a recent downturn in its economy over the past months, but its shown steady progress as the up-tick of prices continues. The downturn was printed up first in 1926 by National Provisioner: "Most fat cows and heavy heifers lost around 25c and in instances the down-turn on better grades was even greater." In February of 1940, the Brits at The Economist got hold of the word (and possibly the precursor to up-tick as well): "The great upturn [of prices] was basically caused by drought, and the great downturn by the breaking of the drought."
Up-turn, down-tick, down-turn, up-tick. Whatever your preference, recent reputation results show there could be dog days for Disney's future.