Engineering amazing

[Laurence Horn]

On Sep 15, 2011, at 8:23 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> On Sep 15, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sep 15, 2011, at 10:46 AM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>>
>>> Sorry. Not the website (that was just for reference) but the expression. It's more engaging than Apple's "Think different."
>>
>> it *could* be that Lexus's "engineering amazing" was intended to convey 'engineering amazingly' (parallel to Apple's "think different"). but the interpretation i got was with "amazing" as a nouning of the adjective "amazing", so that it's the direct object of "engineering": Lexus engineers amazing stuff...
>
> of course, Apple's "think different" can also be read as involving a nouning: 'think of different things' or 'think in a different way'.
>
> arnold
>
And if we wanted evidence for Arnold's hypothesis (or for the fact that Steve Jobs never did anything off the cuff), here's an apposite quote from Steve Jobs (via the recent Isaacson biography and an article on both by Malcolm Gladwell in the Nov. 14 New Yorker), p. 34.  Isaacson writes:
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They debated the grammatical issue: If "different" was supposed to modify the verb "think", it should be ad adverb, as in "think differently". But Jobs insisted that he wanted "different" to be used as a noun, as in "think victory" or "think beauty". Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in "think big". Jobs later explained, "We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It's grammatical, if you think about what we're trying to say. It's not think _the same_, it's think _different_. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. 'Think _different_' wouldn't hit the meaning for me."
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Gladwell uses this anecdote and others to hail Jobs not as a macro-innovator, but as a tweaker, in the best sense of the word (and in the title of his short essay).

LH

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