Word: shorthand
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Much of Cloverfield's visceral force comes from its use of handheld cameras. By the time Blair Witch was made, unstabilized amateur footage was already visual shorthand for disaster, the vernacular of the apocalypse?think of the Zapruder film or the footage of Rodney King being beaten. And that was long before Sept. 11 and YouTube. Grainy, unstabilized footage gives us a sense that what we're watching is real?that the hand brake is off, that we won't be protected by the bland, safe conventions of a studio movie. "I felt like there...
...their income and consumption patterns - 60 million people with high purchasing power, 100 million well on the road to that level of consumption, 100 to 150 million who have just started that journey, and the rest who are at the "bottom of the pyramid" or BOP, in Bijapurkar's shorthand. However, though its members earn less than a dollar a day, the BOP also forms a significant consumer base, says Bijapurkar, and businesses like microfinance have successfully tapped this segment. Indeed, Bijapurkar says, the vast majority of Indian consumers may have limitations but they also have huge potential: low education...
Merriam-Webster decreed “w00t” the number-one word of 2007. A hybrid of letters, numerals, shorthand, and hooting noises, “w00t” is defined as “an interjection expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word ‘yay.’” Instead of analyzing precisely why “w00t” reads better with zeros instead of “o”s, I offer some alternatives, taken from...
Journalists talk about the importance of the "ground game" in Iowa, which is shorthand for an organization's ability to schlep voters to the polls on caucus night. Journalists make scholarly pronouncements about which candidates have the best ground game, but here's a secret: journalists have no idea. In Algona, I spoke to Bill Farnham, a stockbroker, who praised the local Obama organizer, a young man named Nate Hundt, for really ingratiating himself with the community. But Clinton may have the dynamite organizer in Pella; Edwards, in Greenfield. Ground games are unknowable...
...powerful that the magazine has started rankings for pretty darn near everything that can be ranked—from hospitals to high schools. With respect to college rankings at least, which we are best positioned to judge, the rankings do far more harm than good. Any system of shorthand that tries to generalize the individual match between students and colleges—particularly through rankings—will fall flat. The qualities of a college include far more than statistics about retention rates, average SAT scores, and faculty-to-student ratios. The U.S. News ranking in particular encourages bad choices...