Striking: Too much is too much. O. K. Maybe not, especially since the magazine calls itself The Oprah Magazine.

Too much is too much. O. Maybe not, especially since the magazine is called The Oprah Magazine. But 12 pages of photos of the most famous entertainer in the U.S., including the cover, is a bit excessive. In addition, there are five pages of Oprah interviews with Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem, Marion Jones and Christiane Amanpour. And that's not all: every Oprah statement can also be discussed and philosophized about at www.oprah .com. While we rack our brains over efficient customer loyalty measures here, the eloquent businesswoman bluntly demonstrates what star loyalty can be. Diversification down to the last detail. Starting with a strong TV presence and ending with a media presence that is not just about reporting on others, but telling the readership how to behave in life. Be it in psychological or everyday matters. In the spirit of "Don't despair, ask Oprah. Conclusion: Oprah for President. Along with Hillary Clinton, perhaps. O. K. But that's definitely too much. Chandra KurtColumn

Communication, insensitive
From Mike Müller
Time and again, we read about criticism of "insensitive communication": SBB salaries, SAir severance payments, Cantonal Bank bonuses. Truly, there was insensitive communication. While the army communicates with modern means, the league of board members lapses into the tone of an old fighting sow. The tailored suit becomes a butcher's apron, the four-fruit suit a batik overall.
The explanation is simple: The topshots of the Swiss economy continue their education in the wrong place after graduating from the HSG, for example in Entlebuch; they received the butcher's apron (Ackermann-Versand) as a gadget on the last day of the workshop. So what exactly happened at that cattle market in Wolhusen, when Lalive, Honegger and Schmidheiny had to sell an old ram to a wholesaler from Lucerne in a practical exercise? All three first began to praise the ram with chosen words, referred to the beautifully developed portfolio between the thighs and even tried a slightly crude man joke to arouse the wholesaler's willingness to buy. The latter took a deep drag from his stogy and walked away shaking his head. Purified, the CEOs tried their luck on a cattle trader from the bowl, put on the most arrogant city air they could possibly manage with their important faces, and sold the ram at a far inflated price.
An editor of the Entlebucher Woche, who had observed the event, wanted to snap a picture of the three men. They took the film from him and gave him some PowerPoint slides. It was written there in English that they could not give interviews due to foot and mouth disease. They confused their doctor's degrees with medical secrecy.
mikemüller@dplanet.ch
Mike Müller is a performer and
Vocational teacher.
Language Observer

Spralchemie - language between money and spirit
When the alphabet was invented in 1500 BC, the elite who used it consisted mainly of merchants and traders. Among the first alphabetically recorded information, available as tablets from Crete and Syria, are many stock lists, accounts, conversion tables of masses and weights, and so on.
Not only language is changing, but also the way we use it. For about two hundred years, for example, it has increasingly served commercial purposes. Here, it is supposed to attract attention, present a product and show its advantages (classic advertising), awaken people's fantasies and desires as well as their desire to belong (lifestyle), present a company in the best light and arouse sympathy (PR), plant concise messages in people's minds (claims and naming), make people feel good by addressing them in a certain way, and bind them to a company as customers (corporate language). Language should promote business.
Stringing letters together can generate thoughts, feelings or money - if the order is right. A g, an e, an l and a d - money. Money is one among many words in the language. But it has the fascinating property that, used as a language, it can actually generate money: It is able to create its very essence out of its linguistic form. This is demonstrated by brochures of banks and insurance companies. Does language get caught in the maelstrom of money? Where does it lead to if advertising increasingly takes possession of culture? Do we have to found language associations?
The defense of the language is not necessary. As long as there is always a new generation that rediscovers it, it will remain young and fit. It lives and changes, absorbs new terms, also from other cultures, integrates them, transforms them, also digests the "casual language creations of unscrupulous advertising copywriters", it is flexible, pliable, elastic, it provides fresh words and ways of expressing itself every day, it blossoms new...
Let's think back to the stock lists from Crete and Syria. Even if the letters were used differently in the high points of our writing culture (religious, literary, philosophical, scientific works), the fact that today they increasingly serve commercial purposes again is merely a return to the origins.
Beat Gloor, www.textcontrol.ch