Thesaurus Rex

From time to time discussions about the amazing changes in technology over the past few decades will come up, and people will ask me which ones I think are the most important. I will frequently joke with them and say that as a life-long poor speller, I think that Spell Check is the greatest invention since the wheel, but the truth is, the built-in electronic thesaurus is probably a bigger boon to humanity. With this handy device you can look up synonyms to words you don’t know the meanings of in the first place, and I can find dozens or even hundreds of synonyms for the word “stupid” – without which these posts would probably make very monotonous reading. Especially on days like today, when word came in about the Pepsi Refresh Project rescinding a $50,000 grant on the grounds of voter/contest fraud…

If you’re not familiar with the Pepsi Refresh Project (and I wasn’t, despite consulting on grant writing AND drinking more Pepsi products than some entire third-world countries do), it’s less of a corporate giving program and more of a public relations gesture. Instead of using some sensible method to select grant recipients (such as hiring experts on grants, corporate philanthropy, or the social problems the grants are intended to improve), what the company apparently does is select a few possible choices and then open the selection up to Internet voting. In the case which surfaced today , the company awarded $50,000 to an elderly woman in Chicago so that she could go from just having 26 stray cats as pets to actually running a cat rescue operation out of her garage, only to find out that most of the “votes” came from a single server located overseas…

It would be difficult to enumerate all of the ways this actions was unwise, dim-witted, obtuse, foolish, silly and ludicrous, but let me point out that the use of software expert systems (spam-bots and the like) to generate Internet responses of whatever type is desired are not exactly new, and anyone who has spent any time whatsoever online in the last decade should have been expecting such a result. Almost as laughable, daft, ill-advised and brainless was the project they selected, however; I can think of a lot of things that a large corporation like Pepsi could do to improve their public relations, but allowing a neighborhood “cat lady” to give out $100 PetSmart gift cards to all of her friends isn’t really one of them; nor do I expect that enabling someone to take her cats to the vet or build living spaces for the cats in her garage is going to have much traction, since most people know of homeless shelters, programs attempting to cure cancer or dozens of other diseases, impoverished schools, environmental causes, or REAL cat and dog rescue organizations that could have made better use of a $50,000 grant. However, none of this compares to the complete idiocy of rescinding the grant and demanding repayment…

When the cat lady in our story says that she has spend all of the grant money on vet services, buying things for her cats, and giving away pet-related merchandise, I think we have to believe her. Certainly, any person who is even marginally sane would have done so at once, especially if they knew there was a chance the grant would be rescinded. The best that PepsiCo can hope for in this action is to end up in court suing an older woman for assets that she clearly does not have and can not obtain in order to correct a mistake than any ordinary six-year-old with an Internet connection could have told them never to make in the first place. I realize that the company almost has to pursue this, if only to avoid attracting thousands of scammers who realize that they can game the system and not be prosecuted, but there’s a better (which is to say less foolhardy) way: take some of the funds you were going to put into the next crackpot charity scheme and invest in some people to actually screen out frauds, wingnuts, and idiots…

So as you go about your business today, you might want to raise a toast to Peter Mark Roget, inventor of the first modern thesaurus, and all of the hard-working people who spend their lives helping to make our language a little less repetitive. Without them, this post (and many others) would just consist of the word “Duh!” and a series of characters from the top row of your keyboard…