by david allan van nostrand | Oct 29, 2023 | Americana, Human Behavior, The 1960s, The Wayback Machine
Who Was Newton Minow? In 1961, President John F. Kennedy chose Newton Minow as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and gave him free rein to challenge the status quo. Minow was not an industry insider, which the industry found troublesome....
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 23, 2023 | Americana, Human Behavior, Items in the News
How Safe Is Halloween Candy? In the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were a lot of stories about people maliciously tampering with Halloween candy. In 1982, concerns increased when seven Chicago-area Tylenol buyers died from cyanide poisoning just before Halloween. Investigators...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 16, 2023 | Human Behavior, Social archaelogy, Sociology
What Is the Rat Race? When you’re undecided about something, you are not literally “up in the air.” When you’re “over the moon,” you’re still on earth, and when something hits you like “a ton of bricks,” you’ve not been hit by a single brick,...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 9, 2023 | Advertising, Human Behavior, Language, Using Information
Who Is David Ogilvy? The New York Times said David Ogilvy was the Father of the Soft Sell The hard sell is the in-your-face way of selling products. It’s the strategy employed by timeshare salespeople, car dealers, Billy Mays, and the Bass-O-Matic. The hard sell’s...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 2, 2023 | Human Behavior, Language, Sociology, The world around us
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Sociolinguistics is the study of how people use language and how it changes over time. It examines all aspects of the interrelationship of language and society, how language varies among speakers, and the...
