Pentagram's Naresh Ramchandani explores eight words and their significance

Pentagram partner Naresh Ramchandani is the agency’s official ‘word guy’ and its first ever communications and advertising partner. Having started out as a copywriter, co-founded Karmarama, and has a host of notable campaigns to his name. First presented at Design Indaba at the start of the year, then at Nicer Tuesdays in May, below is his essay, about the power of words, and some of his favourites.

I am known by a couple of words. You could call them names. They are Naresh and Ramchandani. The first means King of Kings, and the second, Son of Ramchand. They are pretty big words to live up to. Thanks Mum and Dad.

I am also known by some other words that are a little easier to live up to: Londoner, Indian, Partner, Parent, Average Guitar Player, and Writer – a big word which in my case means a chooser and arranger of words for commercial and sometimes social purposes.

As a chooser and arranger of words, some of my words have stuck. Me Ears Are Alight, Chuck Out Your Chintz, Be Extraordinary Not Ordinary, Make Tea Not War, Do The Green Thing, Please Do Not Be Forgetting Us, Cycle For Peace, I Give An X. All words that people have not entirely ignored, and sometimes I think that’s the best that one can hope for.

Am I good with words? Possibly. Do I like words? Enormously.

I like the way that their sounds form rhythm and music. I like the way that their meanings are both fixed and endlessly interpretable. I like the way they can be funny, or sad, or cutting, or supportive. And I like the way that every word is secondhand and that it’s an everyday challenge to arrange them to say something new.

Out of the one million words in The Oxford English Dictionary, I probably know the same number of words as the average English speaker, which is around 30,000. I’m no word expert, but I am a word fan, and I’m a very big fan of a very small number of words that I’d like to tell you about in this book, together with some other words that I’ve chosen and arranged to explain why I like them so much.

Home

What is a word? A word is a single distinct element of writing or speech that, in the English language, is configured by an almost unique set of shapes taken from 26 letters of the alphabet and articulated by a unique set of sounds taken from approximately 44 spoken phonemes.

Both the shape of the word and the sound of the word are pieces of code for the meaning the word is there to convey. It’s a sophisticated system even at the most basic level when, as babies, we learn words to get the simple physical things we want: Apple, Milk, Spoon, Book, Teddy, Ball.

But it becomes even more sophisticated when it’s a shared piece of code for something much richer and complex and abstract, like the idea of Home.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Home as “the place where one lives permanently, esp. as a member of a family or household; a fixed place of residence”, which is perhaps a little British, a little reluctant to emote.

The trouble with this definition is that the word emotes so quickly, its four letters constructing four physical and psychological walls around a safe space where nakedness, argument, love, warmth, mess, comfort, privacy, and sociability all spread their icky sticky mess all over The Oxford English Dictionary’s sanitised starting point.

Home is lying in your bedroom as a child and hearing the muffled voices of your parents below and knowing that everything is safe. Home is getting out of bed at five o’clock in the morning and knowing where to place your feet to avoid the creaky floorboard that would wake your partner.

Home is your daughter crying because she didn’t get into the college she wanted to and sitting on her bed and holding her and silently telling her that, in time, everything will be okay.

Home is about mussed hair and dressing gowns and putting your feet up anywhere and knowing that here you don’t have to conform or perform. It’s about coming back after being away, to a place where the accents are easy on your ear, to your city, which suddenly looks perfectly clean or wonderfully scruffy or thrillingly buzzy, to your Home, and in the middle of Home, om, the place where you are most at peace.

Country road, take me Home. Home, where my thoughts are waiting silently for me. The stuff of poems, the stuff of songs, but not quite the stuff of cliché, because Home is a word that we all feel.

We feel intense pleasure when we have it, and intense pressure, stress, and anger when it is threatened or denied. Which is why we guard it with locks, bolts, chains, and alarms. Which is why the story of refugees denied a Home is universally affecting. Which is why the recent resurfacing of nationalism in my country is a ghost of a fear from the past; a middle class, roast potato version of the “go home” rage that I had to endure as a young Asian kid growing up in a Britain where some wore their hatred all too openly.

Which is why, when considering which words to include in this book while falling asleep one night last October, and being shaken from my sleep by the sound of three colossal smashes at the front door, and running down the stairs and yelling fury at the people trying to break in, red-mist-raging at the possibility that these wannabe invaders could break the sanctity of Home that my 12-year-old daughter had no reason not to believe in until that moment, I knew the very next day that whatever my eight words were, the simple form and sound of Home, and the deeply human idea it represents, had to be one of them.

Ping-pong

Ping-pong. The King Kong of a genus of words called onomatopoeia, which is a word for a word that imitates the sound that something naturally makes or has. The great thing about onomatopoeia is that it is just so joyful. Bash. Clap. Clatter. Crunch. Groan. Rustle. Sizzle. Slurp. Thud. All wonderful, physical, and resolutely non-intellectual words, often seen in comics and cartoons in jagged or dimensional type.

But that’s also the problem with onomatopoeia; no one takes it seriously. The words are almost too playful, and their comical exterior disguises an extraordinary amount of graft and craft.

Because while it’s easy for words to sound like words – because they’re words – it’s really hard for words to sound like sounds. With just a few noises we can make with our mouths, how can we expect to reproduce all the squawks, gawks, smashes, and crashes that all the world’s life and elements can make? Onomatopoeia really is a tough gig.

Sometimes it takes a bad example to highlight better ones. One such bad example was the original name for Ping-pong – Wiff-waff – a game played on a table with cigar box lids as bats and a ball made from a champagne cork. Now, I don’t rate the name Wiff-waff at all. I don’t think its sounds are an accurate description of the sound of cork to wood, or even close. Wiff-waff is a lousy piece of onomatopoeia.
And as a name, Wiff-waff is even more horrible, too flimsy and louche, describing a sport played by low-effort posh people who flap lazily ata ball with little energy or commitment. So a terrible name for a sub-optimal game, until technology came to the rescue. An acrylic ball was invented and a process was put in motion, a process that would ultimately produce the world’s greatest piece of onomatopoeia, a fabulous piece of craft and one of my eight favourite words.

I believe that the people who named Ping-pong Ping-pong didn’t just arrive at Ping-pong.

I believe that many writers were involved, sitting beside unnamed Ping-pong tables, listening to the sound of bat to ball over and over and over, drafting letter combination after letter combination, crafting word after word to best approximate the sounds they heard, eliminating many less accurate alternatives such as Thuk-thok, Wick-wock, Peripp-peropp, Berdick- berduck and the highly seductive Kerting- kertung before importantly, bravely, brilliantly, beautifully, going with Ping-pong.

They, whoever they were, did a remarkable job in three important ways. Firstly, unlike the hopeless Wiff-waff, you never think that Ping- pong is not the sound of Ping-pong. It’s in the highest order of onomatopoeia, up there with a Purr or a Murmur or a Sniff – an approximation, because of the limitations of our language, but one that is totally credible, totally nailed.

Secondly, the word is not just an approximation of the sound of the game, it’s a verbal representation of the spirit of the game – light, quick, and bouncy with compact competitors in small shorts pinging themselves around a green table in a hyperspeed ballet.

Thirdly, the choice of word was geographically prescient. Ping-pong was coined by a manufacturer in France but when it bounced across the world to Asia, the choice of Ping- pong meant that it already had a sort-of-Asian name, helping it to bounce across Asia too.

So a great word with a perfect sound, wonderful spirit, and genuine global appeal. What’s not to like?

But the final spin on Ping-pong was provided by James Thurber, who was a great American dramatist and short story writer, though I bet his backhand wasn’t as good as mine.

He noticed that Ping-pong, when reversed, is Gnop-gnip, a word that sounded just as Ping- pongy as Ping-pong did. In doing so, he showed us that the word, just like the game, goes backwards and forwards, and is pretty much perfect, whichever way you look at it.

Plug

Plug comes from the Dutch word pluggen and, with its hints of Pugnacious, Lug, Gulp, and Ugly, is not a thing of beauty.

Its meaning is not exactly that special either, describing an object designed to fit functionally into another object, mechanism, or space. So if it’s a butt-ugly word denoting something utterly prosaic, which it is, why is it one of my eight?

Because Plug for me has a small but significant magical property that makes me see language in a completely different way.

Do you have a word that falls apart when you think about it? That makes you see through the very structure and logic of letters and language? Plug is mine, and this is how it works.

I start with a black – or sometimes deep red – space in my mind. Then, in that space, I visualise the word Plug. In capitals with a little 3D effect on each letter. Don’t ask me why, that’s just how it turns out. Then I say the word over and over. Plug. Plug. Plug. Plug. Plug. Plug. Plug. Not out loud, because that would be weird, but in my head. Then, like the moment when you’re staring at one of those stereogram pictures and all the fuzzy dots suddenly reveal a steam train or something, it happens.

The letters start to move.

The p, l, u, and g all start to drift apart, like they’re in space, like they’re freed from the gravity of logic, moving slowly, gently, but
also sort of miraculously. And then, like a vocabulary acid trip, everything unravels.

I start to gaze at each letter individually and wonder what its shape has to do with its sound. What does a p, with its semicircle stuck onto its vertical, have to do with a puh sound? Why do two lines at right angles give us a luh sound? Why couldn’t luh equally be denoted by the two upright lines connected at the bottom by a curve? Oh, because that’s an uh. But why? And why is that three-quarter circle-y thing with a shelf in the middle a guy?

And then things become really strange.

Even if those letters do make those sounds, which now I’m far from certain of, what does that combination of sounds, and that combination of letters, have to do with an object that looks and behaves like a Plug?

And who called it Plug, and why, when they could have called it a Goob or Driggle or a Fliggerflaggen? Toaster’s broken. Don’t worry, it’s just the fuse in the Fliggerflaggen, I’ll change it.

And then my legs go all wobbly, and I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know why my Legs are called Legs and why the letters of Wobbly make that Wobbly sound.

And then I have to sit down, and consider this: that our language is one giant code, with shapes denoting sounds and sounds denoting words and words denoting objects, thoughts, names, actions, ideas, that allow us to have some shared labelling of our physical and imaginative world, because it’s more interesting and useful to describe than to point and to grunt; because we’re insecure, or social, or both.

What a trip. With one little word, I see the code, I see the Matrix, thanks to my blue pill in short, stubby, functional word form. Thanks to Plug.

Change

Sharing most of its letters with Charge and finishing with a big chunk of Anger, Change is a word that positively crackles with energy.

Just look at the words a thesaurus is ready to swap it for: Convert, Metamorphose, Modify, Reform, Refashion, Revamp, Transfigure, Transform. All hugely physical and purposeful words that involve you finding a thing in one state and leaving it in another, which is the very point of Change.

Now, if I’m being a little critical, I don’t think Change is a very attractive word. Its main ch and ge sounds live in the back of the mouth and, like any cave dweller, rarely emerge cleanly.

But it is a very empowering word. Don’t moan, says Change. Don’t complain. Don’t settle. Don’t suffer. With a little bit of effort and skill, you can make it better. You can make it good. You can make it right. You can Change it.

Change what exactly? Well here’s where Change is at its liberal best.

Because whether you’re flossing your teeth more regularly or advancing the causes of nationalism, internationalism, consumerism, environmentalism, or any other ism, Change doesn’t mind what you Change or on what scale you Change it.

There is a subtlety baked into the word, though. A difference between a Change, which is something personal, and Change, which is something societal. And as commercial creators and public persuaders, I believe we have a responsibility to make the second sort. To make full-scale Change.

We are makers of culture. We have magic in our hands. We put ideas into the public realm, and in a small way, or in a larger way, those ideas can be part of any Change we want to see.

Personally, I would like to see a world with a little less prejudice, a little less gender stereotyping, a little less focus on beauty. It would be good to have a bit more tolerance, a bit more mindfulness, a bit more opportunity. It would be great if we could think less about ourselves and more about others, and if we could be less self- centred as a generation leaving the planet in the hands of generations to come.

That’s what I call Change, and I’m trying to make it happen. Which is why I say no to any commercial work that goes against my value system, that Changes things for the worse and not the better. And why I have to be careful when throwing a large part of my year into a piece of work that’s positively commercial but distinctly Change-neutral, because there’s a lot to Change and there isn’t much time to do it.

And it’s why I say yes to working with organisations that advance the causes I believe in; non-profits set up to further the greater good and enlightened for-profits that reconcile their balance sheets with what they do for the world. And it’s why, around these projects, I look to do personal projects that also try to Change things. A campaign to help a corner shop combat a major supermarket. Placards to campaign against an unjust war. Creative inspiration pieces to make sustainable living desirable.

Change isn’t easy. Some people don’t want it. Many find it disturbing. It’s hard to measure. But Change is my Change, from wanting to make a career for myself to wanting to make a contribution.

Give peace a chance. Land, peace, and bread. Black is beautiful. Je suis Charlie.

It’s a good word because it’s what words are good at. Change.

Grace

I believe that creativity should change the world. I also believe that creativity should Grace the world.

Let me explain why.

I cut my creative teeth in advertising which gave me useful perspectives on commercial creativity, including the perspective that much of the creativity we put into the world is by its very nature an unwanted intervention.

We click to watch a video on YouTube and a commercial muscles in first. We read a piece on a news site and a banner breaks it up. We take a walk down the road and the scene is subverted by hundreds of messages on posters, shop fronts, and road signs, telling us to buy this, withdraw cash here, wait here, walk here, here is a road, here is a dry cleaner, here is a clothes store, and here is this coat at 50% off.

Sometimes useful but more often self- promotional, these interventions are pieces of litter in our day, blowing around our streets and into our minds, shoving their self-centred agendas in our faces. From a creative point of view, how do you stop your piece of communication from being unwanted litter? How do you give it some worth?

One way is to ensure it is part of the Change agenda; to ensure it advances an interest beyond its own and adds some genuine provocation and enrichment into people’s lives.

The other way is to ensure that it is pleasant, attractive, fitting. That it is thought through and resolved. That it presents a picture that, even if disruptive, especially when disruptive, is well worked out, well crafted, considered, considerate of the person who will consume it, and considerate of the place where it will be consumed. That it Graces the world it is part of.

Grace comes from the Latin word gratius, which means both Thankful and Pleasing, which give us two perfect insights into one special word. When you Grace a room or place, or a moment in time or space, you are thankful to be there, and from that gratitude – because of that gratitude – you want to please, complement the scene, carry yourself well. Though Grace doesn’t start with yourself, it starts with others, and wanting to do things well for them, which is what makes it such a wonderful, generous word.

Say Grace, but you don’t have to be spiritual. Be Grace, but you don’t have to be a princess of Monaco. Just be Gracious, keeping all disturbance, bother, and mechanism below the surface, doing so with your skill, experience, craft, and taste, so that you or your work is not an unwanted intrusion but a pleasure that is warm and welcome.

In my world, Grace is a piece of writing with the precise logic, tone, sounds, and rhythm that make it interesting when needs be, simple when needs be, and right. Or Grace is a film in which the pictures, dialogue, sound effects, and music know exactly how to defer to each other, support each other, dance with each other. Or a piece of animation that uses the fewest lines necessary to convey the maximum information or emotion possible.

Some say Grace is a feminine quality, or a feminine idea, but I don’t think so. Just a slight softening of all that is competitive and muscular, brusque and boorish, the Gentle in Gentleman, and – importantly for me – the sugar to the sometimes bitter pill of Change, sharing most of its letters but creating a softer, more fluid sound, as only Grace could.

Grace brings some Dignity to Change’s Anarchy, brings some Persuasion to Change’s Provocation, brings some Resolve to Change’s Roughness. Makes the Change more worthy of Consideration.

If I had a two-word manifesto for my work, and life, it would be Change and Grace; having the stupidity and courage to want to Change the world, and having the Grace to call for it decently.

Pathetic

As a rule, I try not to be unpleasant to people. It’s just not a very good idea.

Unpleasantness demeans the person you are unpleasant to in so many ways, leaving them feeling stupid or hurt or unconfident or betrayed or murderously vengeful or all of those things.

It also demeans yourself in so many ways, leaving you feeling snappish or snobbish or patronising or petty or a giant jerk or all of those things. I asked my infinitely wise partner Sarah under what circumstances unpleasantness was ever justified, and she said none, and of course she was right.

But sometimes you can’t help it.

Sometimes when confronted by another’s unfathomable idiocy or staggering selfishness or comprehensive horribleness, the snarky part of you conquers the Gandhi part of you and you are wrongly but deliciously compelled to tell the other party exactly what you think of them.

And that’s when you need the greatest put- down known to humankind: the word Pathetic.

Let’s slow this one-word body blow down to see how it works so perfectly.

Pathetic leads magnificently with a sharp, withering puh, the lip curling and sneering to deliver a sound of utter disdain. That lead ushers in the intellectual centre of the word, the ancient Greek bit, Pathos. Even if you don’t know what Pathos means, you feel something clever at work here. You feel that, behind the insult, figures like Aristotle and Socrates are eating olives and laughing and shaking their heads at you. And if you do know what Pathos means, you understand that you are now seen as pitiful by the whole of humanity.

Then after the intellectual centre, comes the final flourish – the ick – causing the speaker to literally spit in the direction of the receiver’s face; a subtle or not-so-subtle spray that leaves a victim totally and utterly humiliated.

With this potent combination of sophistication and substance, Pathetic towers over every other type of insult. Compared to melodramatic put-downs like Awful or Appalling or Diabolical, Pathetic has effortless style, existing in the realm of pressed linen suits, weighty cufflinks, Vogue cigarettes, and Chanel No.5.

Compared to officious jibes like Unacceptable or Not good enough, Pathetic contains true disdain, making any wrong feel like a monumental cock- up bred by incompetence and fed by laziness.

And compared to the single-syllable disses – You Dick! You Shit! You Ass! – Pathetic has far more weight. Stoked by anger or alcohol and filled with fragile bravery, those thoughtless blurts are easy to brush off. But when you tell someone they are Pathetic, it says you have observed them comprehensively, judged them conclusively, and analysed your way to this tough but fair summation.

And because of that weight, the word lingers, trapped in the air between the elevated giver and the crushed receiver, who now has to deal with all the reasons why he or she probably deserved it.

However it’s used, wherever it’s used, Pathetic is the H-bomb of the English language and leaves the receiver with little dignity and even less chance of finding any soon.

It’s so devastating that I haven’t used it for ten years, maybe more. But when it’s time to be unpleasant, it’s nice to know I’ve got it at
my disposal.

Selflessness

It was two years ago when a friend told me about him. His improbable name was Henry Ponder, and he was a minor poet who was tweeting charming verses about everyday things every day.

I was curious, and I admired the discipline of that kind of creative ritual. So I started to follow him on social media. What I found were daily meditations in 140 characters or less on topics such as the diplomacy of the colour beige, the unsung heroism of a screw that holds the world together, the discrete and opposite virtues of ceilings versus walls and how one protects, the other divides.

A few weeks after I started following him, Henry tweeted a poem that struck me very deeply, called “Of Others”.
Remove from the world
the self and the selfie;
think of others,
take an everyone-elsie.

In one micro-poem, Henry had explored and embodied one of my favourite ideas and words: Selflessness. An abbreviated haiku, the word Self-less-ness tells a story. Self.

It’s a state of being. Less. Not an act. Ness. A challenge to be it as much as humanly possible. Although 12 letters long, the word only uses five different letters which is, in itself, a perfect act of Selflessness. And though it means so much of so many other words like Friendship, Kindness, Generosity, and Togetherness, it never presumes to take the place of any of them.

The habitual selflessness of Selflessness contrasts with the serial self-centredness of Self. In the two-volume The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1993, the word Self hogs four entire pages with its definitions and endless prefixes such as Self-conscious, Self-taught, Self-help, Self-destruct, Self- motivated, and Self-employed.

Like Pre-Copernican astronomy that put the earth at the centre of the universe, Self puts itself at the centre of everything. It loves the word I, but not as much as the word Me, and looks for everyone and everything to confirm and affirm it. It puts its own interest at the top of any agenda and is deeply unattractive for doing so.

But Self is not to be blamed. It has all the encouragement in the world, living as it does in a first person economy in which all progress must have a hero and all success must have a face.

The trouble with Self is that Self takes up so much time and energy. Grooming your Self, promoting your Self, affirming your Self, checking that your Self is making the right impression with the right people at the right times. It leaves no space for considering other people, considering what they’re thinking or doing beyond what they think about you or what they could do for you. It leaves no room for Selflessness.

Selflessness is about the removal of Self as much as possible. Listening to a conversation rather than dominating it. Being interested in a point of view that’s different to your own. Starting from the assumption that you are nothing special, and everyone else and everything else is probably at least as special as you are. Wanting to help, rather than wanting to be seen as the person who helped.

Far from dull or eye-rollingly worthy, Selflessness is a delight. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment. Next time a Starbucks barista asks you for your name, give them a name of an old friend and see all the interesting things you think and feel when that coffee is ready and that name is called. It’s better than the coffee, I can tell you that.

Or take Henry Ponder, a fellow wordsmith and a master of the art of stepping outside of himself and into the shoes of others. Without Selflessness, Henry would not be able to empathise with a once-frozen carrot thawing on his countertop, or with a hammer unhappy with its brutish reputation, and poetry would be a little less dumb and less wonderful as a result.

If I were a hammer, cast as aggressor, and I had a gentle side, how would I show it?
Always bashing, never bashful, how would people know it?

I’ve helped to produce two short films about Henry, because he’s one of the most fulfilled and interesting people I’ve come across. As a reporter from the world’s blind spots, shining light into the unconsidered corners of our lives, Henry represents the capacity and opportunity that each of us has for Selflessness; for thinking less of our Selves, and more of others, and being more human as a result.

Maybe

My eighth and final word is Maybe, and for me it is my lesson in another m word – Maturity. I don’t know if I’m rewriting my personal history here, but when I turn to look over my shoulder, one part of my past looks something like this:

When I was young, I wanted certainty. I wanted to know what I needed to know and not to need to know what I didn’t know. I wanted my judgement to be quick and absolute on any question about behaviour, humour, love, hatred, creativity, philosophy, anything.

I wanted the simplistic absolute; for those I feared to be only bad, and those I admired to be only good. I wanted be able to say Yes, No, Right, Wrong, Good, Bad, Always, and Never about everything I came across. And not just say it, but be heard to say it, pronouncing wherever possible in an attempt to look interesting, but in practice just wanting to be right.

Did The Pixies invent grunge by themselves? Totally. Do good parents ever divorce? Never. Has there ever been a better poem than “The Wasteland”? Of course not.

In short, I was an opinionated ass who probably used Maybe less than ten times in my first 25 years on this earth.

Imaginary therapist: Do you think you wanted to express yourself in bolshy certainties because you were a young man whose main concern was to impress? Me: Definitely not. Imaginary therapist: Let me put it another way. Did the opposite of certainty – doubt – strike you as a weakness rather than a strength? Me: No. Therapist: Really? Me: Well, Maybe.

The April birds, and the Maybes, all there in a garden of possibilities that I started to see as I became less young, a garden that lies beyond a door that can be slammed shut with an absolute answer or left ajar with a Maybe, allowing us to leave a house where everything is known and find something not known, new.

Is there a chance that jazz isn’t music from the past but music for the here and now and if a bunch of contemporary DJs and producers adopted it, we’d all know it? Maybe. Is there a possibility that none of us are fully female or fully male but all a degree of transgender and that transgender people are the people who show us who we really are? Maybe.

You can argue against Maybe. You can say that it’s too purist, that it stands aloof from a Yes or No with the irritating claim that you can never really know. Or you could say that it is a privilege that few can afford, because Maybe asks for time to engage and explore options, whereas certainty is quick and certainty is now.

And I will just say – Maybe. May, opening the mouth in wonder, and Be, turning the lips into a smile at the wonder perceived. Two equal syllables made from four letters pivoting around a fifth, the y, like a set of scales, gently weighing the options, in absolutely no hurry to judge until it knows. With absolutely no problem about looking weak because honesty is strong, vulnerability is strong, and wanting to offer the little you know to others who may know more to build a more complete picture together, that is strong too, far stronger than overconfident, over-opinionated Yes No All or Nothing BS.

Maybe is not the easiest thing to say, but as I grow up, it has become easier, and has become, Maybe, my favourite word of all.