Yesterday I found myself on the Merriam-Webster website, and in the sidebar I saw that a very interesting word was trending.
The word was:
Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
So, curiosity piqued, I clicked to see the definition, which is:
lake on the border with Connecticut in south central Massachusetts
Okay, great . . . That tells me what it is, but I clicked on the word because it’s unique; I wanted to know why it’s called that. How did it get that name, and what does it mean?
But for that info I realized I needed an encyclopedia, so on the Encyclopedia Britannica page for Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg I learned that:
“
The lake’s name is reportedly Algonquian for what popular culture has held to mean “You fish on your side; I fish on my side; nobody fishes in the middle,” although there is evidence that this interpretation was fabricated by a local news correspondent in the early 20th century.
Voila, all my questions answered.
Here’s the thing . . .
If you have a unique offering, people don’t just want to know what you do, they want to know why you do it in your unique way, how it got to be that way, and what it means to you (which they can then translate into what it means for them).
And the best way to answer those questions is to develop your content to function like an encyclopedia, and not simply as a dictionary.
