Hey, you came back!!!

SO glad we didn’t scare ya away. 

It’s Aug. 23. On this day in 1939, Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact, divided Poland in a secret annex, and broke the whole thing within 2 years. Which, for a document signed by 2 men actively planning to kill each other, is a better run than your brand guidelines are having.

Brand voice guides are gunning for that record. This week, I got sent a 47-page brand style guide that cost $180,000, defines the company as “confident but humble,” and has been opened 34 times since 2019, 31 of those by freelancers on day 1.

If one more person tells me a sentence “feels a little AI,” I’m going to lie down on the floor of Erewhon and let them scan me.

Because this is the new Red Scare. Nobody’s calling it that, because the accused is a semicolon, not some cool cat communist. But starting about 18 months ago, every person who hadn’t read a book since college decided that they’re able to sniff out AI writing. What they’re actually smelling is a writer who knows words.

I have a list. 300 words long, started in a Google Doc in 2024, and I add to it the way other folks take up running clubs. I tell people it’s a style guide, but it’s really more of a self-defeating blacklist. These are names words I gave up so I could keep working.

• Leverage. Died as it lived, doing nothing. Survived by “use,” who was standing right there the whole time and got passed over anyway.
  

• Unlock. Cause of death: no door.
  

• Journey. She’s buying software. She is not walking The Road to El Dorado (underrated movie, by the way).
  

• Transformation. A verb that got fat. Somebody nominalized “change,” gave it 3 extra syllables and a keynote slot, and now it costs $400,000. Nothing has ever been transformed. A team got reorganized, two people quit, and everybody printed new business cards.
  

• Delve. Guilty. No woman I know has ever said “delve” out loud with a straight face, in any room, at any volume. It’s the only word here that actually sounds like a robot, which makes it the single most useful thing a chatbot has ever given us, a litmus test to see if whoever is editing our work knows how to edit.
  

• The em dash. This one didn’t do anything. I mean, it’s not even a word! And yet, our dearly beloved em dash has been holding this language together since Emily Dickinson, who used about a thousand of them and was never accused of being a chatbot, largely because she's dead. Now I’m rationed to 1 per 700 words like it’s sugar in 1943.

And then there’s the one that wasn’t my call…

“Real.” “Actual.” And God help me, “literally.”

So, a true story. A client read a line of mine that said “the struggle is real” and another one that said to “hop on an actual phone call,” because millennial folks like me hate talking on the phone, just shoot me a damn text! Anyways, he wrote back asking me what I meant by “actual.” Wouldn’t any phone call be an actual phone call?

Then he told me nobody says “real.”

Nobody. Says. Real. 

flips table

Are you F#*^+$&  KIDDING ME?!?!? 

Sir. I say “real.” Every person I know says “real.” My sister said, out loud, in a Lyft, “no, it was an actual real Labubu, not a Lafufu,” and every person in that car understood her immediately, including our driver, Mamadou. (Awesome dude, by the way. Five stars!)

But the note wasn’t that the line was weak. The note was that, to him, it sounded like AI. 33 years of my own vocabulary on the page, and this man identified the tell as the 1 word in the sentence that I learned to say when I was in diapers. I wrote back a full paragraph defending “actual.” I cited my friends. I cited my sister. I cited a counterfeit collectible.

He said: “Fair enough.”

Which, if you haven’t known already, is what men tell women that have proven them wrong. (It’s actually a sign of great respect in their culture.)

And fine. Yes. The list made me better. Take away the soft words and there’s nowhere left to stand, nothing to hide behind, no padding between me and the thing I mean. Every writer should be so lucky.

But run the numbers... I’m surrendering 4 words a month to stay employable. At this rate, I’m filing copy in my own handwriting by 2031, and someone is going to look at my hands and tell me “hmm…it feels a little AI to me.”

I’d rather die. Nay, I’d rather delve. 

— Sarah Suzuki Harvard

Pasty Man sells SPF by telling men they're going to die

Pasty Man, a New York sunscreen brand, led with "Women don't need another sunscreen. Men do," then produced a mustached man in white boxers, knee socks, and dress loafers, kneeling before an orange backdrop, holding the tube out like a relic he stole from a church.

Then the stat: Men are nearly twice as likely to die of skin cancer, mostly because men treat SPF with the same priority as flossing, therapy, and calling mom back.

What got me in a chokehold was their tagline: "For men who love the sun but hate to die." 10 words. Beauty spent 40 years selling glow to women and never once considered that the male version of glow is, well, um… not dying? 

h/t Tobias Carlson, who launched it. Great work. 10/10

Alright, that’s my time. I’m Margaret Cho. See you next week. 

— sarah suzuki harvard 🫡

Chat, are we cooked? New research links heavy midlife TV-watching to brain shrinkage, which raises a question nobody at that university had the courage to ask: if watching TV and short-form video shrinks your brain, what is it doing to the people who WRITE it? Turns out I'm not a copywriter, but a guy in a tattered shirt and gym shorts handing out cigarettes outside a hospital. I have a 401k. It's funded by this. My mother tells people I work "in media," and I guess she’s technically correct and morally generous.