Adapted from the comments to my post on EU & the smoking ban:
Here's the beginning of the ban movement in the USA:
Here are the instructions* from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a tame charity controlled by Johnson & Johnson's (makers of cessation products). Page one of the fundamentals of smoke-free workplace laws (pdf) is a roll-call of all the other fakecharities, fakepressuregroups and front organisations who've got in on the act.
These bans will probably go down in history as the greatest marketing scam ever.
* Why do FakeCharities have this obsession with joining two words together but then capitalising the second word? They've gone full circle here and head up their instructions "The SmokeLess States Program", with a capital 'L'. 'Smokeless' was only one word to start with, FFS.
Monday 8 June 2009
'Cos the USA has fakecharities too ...
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7 comments:
Smokeless means without smoke. SmokeLess means a reduction in smoking. It's a Newspeak scam to redefine the word to suit their interests. Smokeless *was* a word which they are trying to repurpose (like "inflation" was repurposed by the banks to mean "rising prices" instead of "expanding money supply", or "terrorism" was redefined from what GW Bush did to what the IRA did).
AW, I shall consider myself out-pedanted on this occasion!
I still disagree on 'terrorism' - the IRA are terrorists because they are not a state, we may not agree with what GWB did, and while he terroried people, he was not, as such, a terrorist.
It's more that terrorism was redefined from what Germany did in the Low Countries in WWI (a modern version of Ghengis Khan's alleged policy of killing every inhabitant of a town if it resisted) to the actions of some stateless groups who deliberately use violence against civilians to achieve political ends. The Bush obsession is silly.
The smokeLess thing is a rare example of geek chic - camelcase, as it's called, is a convention for variable names in some programming languages, such as ecmascript - and it does work in that context. Somehow, it found its way into the imagination of designers.
"Why do FakeCharities have this obsession with joining two words together but then capitalising the second word? "
Possibly because they're all spending their oodles of taxpayer moohlah with the same small pool of marketing firms?
RWJ Foundation is a legacy-led organisation IIRC, with an annual fund for tobacco bansturbators of around $700m.
It's hard to get any sort of truth out when there is so much trough to get a righteous snout into.
re: SmokeLess - I reckon it's because Chris Mounsey (aka Devil's Kitchen) is a Mac guy and Mac APIs up to Carbon used CamelCase e.g. GetNewControl(), PointInRect() etc. Now in Cocoa they use mixedCase e.g. applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:, so it would be 'smokeLess'.
DG, thanks for that. PR's comment puzzled me because I thought programming languages didn't use capitals.
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