The way it works here at CTP, coining a phrase means you coin that exact phrase, as is. This means that there is no English grammar police officer patrolling the database, on the hunt for errors in spelling or punctuation.  You coined it, you own it.  This is partly because if the job of English cop were handed out around here, I can bet I’d be the one doing it and I wouldn’t have any time to sit around and dream up smart-assery.

In order to underscore the importance of punctuation and of making sure that the phrase you coin will look right on a coffee mug or t-shirt, I have included today a perfect illustration of the matter.

Above we find a college photograph of the soon-to-be-former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.  She has apparently taken some time from her grueling studies in hair and makeup at the University of Idaho in the 80s and is showing us an amusing t-shirt that reads:

I may be broke but, I’m not flat busted.

“Busted”, see?  Why, I do believe she’s talking about her breasts! Oh my! What began as a commentary on her student poverty has instead become a wry invitation to notice her generous ta-tas!

After we emerge from the fit of delighted laughter at the funny, funny breasts, we notice that upon all the hilarity lies an unfortunate gaffe.  There is a sadly misplaced comma on Sarah’s t-shirt. It should instead read:

I may be broke, but I’m not flat busted.

That’s an error because the comma indicates an interruption or separation in thought, and the first of the two thoughts in the sentence ends with the word broke.

Oops!  Well, in her defense, CTP wasn’t around when the Governor was in college, and such t-shirts were commonly mass-produced and purchased pre-printed.  The fact is, she didn’t have the chance to Coin That Phrase properly as she could today, once someone explained to her what a web site is.

You, however, were born in the right time and have no such limitations: Coin Those Phrases and Coin ‘em right!  The national political career you launch is riding on it!

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

- Toni Morrison

Coin That Phrase is tough to describe sometimes.  Is it a social network, is it a repository of content, it’s a merchandising service?  The short answer is yes, it’s all these things.  But what does it mean when the crowd shows up to coin phrases by the truckload?  Who “owns” the content?

At CTP, if you enter a phrase into the database, you’ve coined it and you get the credit, along with a cool digital certificate suitable for framing.  We can’t and don’t give you the credit for creating it, but rather for entering and tagging it at CTP.  This means that inside the CTP site and network, you “own” the exact phrase, warts and all, as you spelled and punctuated it.

This idea of a new form of ownership is key to what CTP was built to do.  The crowd provides the content and the discussion and we produce the facilities, the voting mechanism, the merchandising manufacture and revenue sharing.  We all “own” what we contribute, and what we contribute is what’s valuable to us.

Hey all,

We received word that Authorize.net, who CTP uses as one of our payment processors is having a service outage reportedly due to a fire in a Seattle datacenter.  Here’s a post at TechCrunch on the problem.

What this means for CTP users is: until further notice, Coin That Phrase will accept only PayPal as payment. Not a major hassle for everyone, we hope.  If you have any questions for us about the outage, send them along to info@cointhatphrase.com.

As we move through our live Beta, some CTP users have asked what exactly the deal is with the tags that we ask you use when you coin a new phrase.  What are the right terms to use for a newly entered phrase?

First off, let’s look at what tags are.  As you move through the blogosphere, you have surely noticed that posts are annotated with tags that indicate what the post is about.  These, like at CTP (and here at the  CTP blog) are short descriptors of the content and context of the thing being tagged.

So let’s say you were to coin the phrase “Haste Makes Waste”  – an old Benjamin Franklin classic.  How could you tag it with useful and appropriate tags?

I can think of a few tags that work by thinking about the searcher – that is, thinking about the person who is clicking on a tag and what they should see when they click or search.  I ask myself “what words, when searched/clicked, should show this phrase?”

With that, I can think of a few good tags:

advice – because old Ben Franklin’s phrase is in fact “opinion about what should be done” (freedictionary.com)

aphorisms – because it’s also “an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and easily memorable form (wikipedia.com)

business – once you figure out the phrase is advice, it’s good to expand on that by asking “what kind of advice is it?”  It’s definitely good business advice.

Ben Franklin -  because this quote is commonly attributed to US Founding Father Benjamin Franklin – who, by the way, would have loved Coin That Phrase.  CTP is built on wit, words and printing – all three were central obsessions of his!

All of these are valid.  You also have to know when to stop; it doesn’t for example, make sense to tag the entry as “Colonial American” solely because that’s Franklin’s era.  The phrase isn’t locked into any one specific era, so tagging it as such is a bad idea.

Think about how you’d want to find your phrases, then coin ‘em and tag ‘em!