Slightly Askew

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be

If an idea of yours has ever been greeted by blank looks and general indifference, well done.  Keep up the good work.

Don’t worry, the book will explain everything.

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Apostrophes are like knives: bloody dangerous in the wrong hands.

Now, as we know: apostrophes are used to denote possession or to denote missing letters.  Never plurals.  Never.  Even when it (arguably) adds a touch of clarity.

A bugbear of mine is do’s and don’ts.  It should be dos and don’ts.

Yes, dos looks like something computer programmers use, but do’s is just wrong.  There is no missing letter and no possession - so just leave that poor apostrophe out of it.

And if you’re going to persist with do’s, then for the sake of being consistently stupid, you should write don’t’s.

Pluralising common words often leads to trouble.  The following poem is from Woe is I and is rather wonderful.  (And yes, noes is the plural of no.)

Words to the Whys

Ups and downs and ins and outs,
Forevers and nevers and whys.
Befores and afters, dos and don’ts,
Farewells and hellos and goodbyes.
Life is a string of perhapses,
A medley of whens and so whats.
We rise on our yeses and maybes,
Then fall on our noes and our buts.

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Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

Wise words, I reckon.

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Here’s an interesting idea.

And here’s my attempt.

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Says a sign on my way to work.

Hmm.

One really big shrub is doing a tap dance?

A really big shrub is being sold?

A shrub suitable for giants is putting on a performance?

Heavy machinery is being sold?

Heavy machinery is putting on a show?

Or a really big amount of normal-sized shrubs are being sold?

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Excuse me?

I’ll think you’ll find that you sent me the unsolicited email.  So who the hell are you to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do?

Sending an email from an address such as do-not-reply@igonorant-arseholes.com is akin to phoning your mate and saying:

Hi there, I’ve got something to tell you.  I don’t want your opinion on what I’ve got to say, nor am I looking for any answers.  I’m just going to talk at you for a bit and then hang up.

Those with any sort of self-esteem would hang up first, of course.  Obviously, injecting an abrupt:

How about you fuck off

before doing so would be ideal.

If you want people to buy a product, converse with them.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s credit cards (yup, that’s you Tesco; every little bit helps you know) or music (Polydor - you’re on the ropes, don’t make it worse for yourselves), allow your customers to speak to you.

They’ll like you all the more for it.

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Have you been browsing on the World Wide Web recently?

Hopefully not.  Surfing the web is quite adequate.  Come on, take a few deep breaths; it’s not scary anymore.

There’s a school of thought that the web is a place, and therefore a proper noun.  So it’s more correctly the Web.  Utter shite.  The web isn’t a place.  Kenya is a place.  Florida is a place.  Lowestoft is a place (although there’s no need to confirm this by visiting, trust me).

The web’s just a bit like the internet (no, you don’t need a capital I in that either).  You read something on the web, or watch something on the internet.  You wouldn’t read a Book, or watch the Television, so you don’t surf the Web.

Leave the World Wide Web, hereafter known as ‘the Web’, for the legal drafters - they’re beyond saving.

Oh, and if you’re still spelling email E-mail, you may like to know that they’ve unified Germany, stopped selling video tapes, and mobile phones have become quite a craze.

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Some time ago, an article by Erin Kissane stirred a hatred inside of me.  Not because I didn’t like the article; I loved the article.  She give a thorough and humourous explanation as to why the word solution is, well, shit.

“Solution” is much too vague to be useful.

And she’s absolutely right.  I went to an ebusiness seminar today and every godforsaken IT company in attendance were parading their products as solutions.  Even better (and by that, I mean worse), an end-to-end solution.  As I sit writing this, I’m still no closer to fathoming-out exactly what those products actually did.

So this nonsense has to stop now.  Just because the financial sector is often riddled with self-indulgent jargon, the IT crowd should not be trying to play catch-up.  If you’re a consumer, and someone can’t explain what something does without using the word solution, that something probably isn’t worth buying.

After all: you can call a turd a bowel disposal solution, but it’s still a turd.

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It was quite some time ago when Wash & Go devised this snappy strapline.  Their product, you may remember, contained both shampoo and conditioner - negating the need for that frequent which bottle? decision.

In my youth, there were many great inventions like this: coke that looked like lemonade but tasted like coke; Push-Pops (a sweet you could eat, but save the rest for later); and teeth-coroding cereals made of compressed sugar, packaged under slightly misleading names such as Lucky Charms.

It’s a tribute to the marketers that Wash & Go’s product has all but dissappeared from our consicence, yet the strapline is cemented in the brains of those who witnessed the particular ad.  But why?

Maybe it was about the convenience: appealing to consumers by making our drab lives that little bit easier.  Perhaps it actually was a problem the world over; that people were flamboyantly sacrificing the shine of their hair so one hand was free to turn the shower on.  Or maybe it’s because blokes all over the world turned to a female and asked: “what’s a conditioner?”

For those who had lost sleep, churning the pros and cons of each bottle in their respective minds, Wash & Go was a saviour.

Now, I don’t boil eggs often (you can see where I’m going with this).  Possibly because of the lack of equipment I own in order to do so:  I’ve no egg-timer and no egg-cups.

But will I buy two types of egg-boiling equipment?  I think not.

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What the devil does this actually mean?

It seems that 100% is the new nice.  So when you say:

This pizza is 100% quality and 100% tasty.

You’re really saying:

This pizza is really nice.

To me, it’s just lazy.  Would a company say that any of its products were less than 100% quality?  Probably not - unless that was their selling point (e.g. Car for sale.  No engine; no wheels; excessive rust.  Found in woods.  Countless careless owners.  £10.).  So by using 100% something, you’re just wasting space.

A way of making 100% tasty better, would be to do a bit of maths before it.  For instance:

50% cheesey + 50% meaty = 100% tasty

Okay, so it’s not exactly brilliant, but at least you know why the pizza is meant to be so tasty.  You can’t just tell me it’s 100% tasty, because I don’t believe you.  Tell me why Mr Pizza Man.  Tell me why.

This rant comes courtesy of Domino’s Pizza.

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