Monday, December 29, 2008

Give us verbs

I'm getting acquainted with a new client, and they give me a book about the company. The first words I see on the dust jacket are:

INNOVATION & INTEGRITY

They do nothing for me at all. First of all, they're nouns. Secondly, they're the worst kind of nouns. I want verbs. As it turns out, there's a beeline of great verbs about a hundred pages in, where they're describing how you test intermodal containers to meet railroad specifications:
You load the container to twice its weight-bearing capacity, lift it up, and measure the deflection of things. ... What you try to do is break it, and you try to twist it corner to corner. Then you push the top. ... Then you set it down and make sure it goes back to the way it was. Then you put big airbags in it and try to blow the nose and back doors and sides out of it. Then you load it with an irregularly placed load, very heavy in the middle, and lift that up. You test the roof for strength. You test it for watertightness. You simulate 3,000 forklifts' movements in and out of it, and you simulate lifting it and setting it down 1,500 times. 
That's what I love about this business: finding sentences like these. So specific to a narrow slice of industry, and so full of action. 

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