Advertising creative departments are split into word-people and picture-people.

It makes sense, because words and pictures serve different purposes; pictures elicit emotional response, and words describe and categorize. Together, a pretty picture + some clever copy = a compelling story.

But there are other ways of crafting a story. Language gets interesting when we realize that it doesn’t have to just name and categorize—that words themselves can be images. While not an ad, this infographic from National Geographic is a good example.

In advertising, communication that stops you in your tracks is good communication. Sometimes, the best way to do that is with content that’s familiar but also disorienting. This map has a recognizable outline but it tells a new story about the space it inscribes—it maps out a history of clandestine metonymy, of fruitful misunderstanding.

At first glance, the words on the map seem to make a predictable, geographical kind of sense—“Snow Covered Mountain” seems fitting for Tacoma, WA, after all—but spend a little time with the map and it starts to tell a different story.

The words don’t just stand for the places they name: “Left-Handed” for Niwot, CO? “Let’s Have Intercourse” for Loleta, CA? Names like these suggest a pattern of linguistic misfires between early settlers and Native Americans, and indeed, according to National Geographic, Loleta comes from a misunderstood joke.

Could you say that communication between these two groups failed? You could, if you were operating under the assumption that language ought to delineate and demarcate. And it should, of course. But it gets more fun when that’s not all it does—when it becomes part of the stuff of life, as material and emotive as what it names.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under underground. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.