As part of becoming self-employed, you fill in a lot of forms. Insurance, banking, website registration: a lot of white DL envelopes have sat on the mantlepiece over the last few weeks.
Most are addressed like this:
X company
1 Big Street
Anytown
AA1 1AA
or:
X company
PO Box 000
Anytown
AA1 1AA
They say something, these addresses. We're a big company: everyone knows where we are. We have sophisticated mechanisms to make sure that your envelope ends up in the right pigeon hole. We know what we're doing.
Until I got to my National Insurance contributions form, which has to go to my old friends HM Revenue & Customs. Here's the address (and here's how I read it):
Customer Accounts Section (We're very busy and important you know: we have an awful lot of sections)
Inland Revenue (Although we're not yet too sure what we're called...)
National Insurance Contributions Office (NICO: big, terribly important; we think we're a bit like the Home Office)
Self Employment Services (We're not too good at redirecting post internally though, and we certainly don't believe in PO Boxes)
Processing Centre (Because you will be processed)
Benton Park View (I may be taking a liberty here, but I'm guessing that the 'View' of 'Benton Park' may not be quite as pastoral as this sounds...)
Newcastle upon Tyne (So presumably where the call centre is)
NE98 1ZZ
I've worked with plenty of bignormous companies that boil complex directions like this down to a set of post codes or PO boxes.
At 8 lines, I can barely squeeze it on the envelope (don't be silly - of course they didn't send me one). I feel thoroughly processed. Mind you, I guess I should be grateful that it reached me at all, given it's addressed to the wrong name, and the rather abrupt person at the 'helpline' obviously entered my town as 'Hounslow' in Milton Keynes, rather than 'Hanslope'...
Wednesday 28 February 2007
Wednesday 21 February 2007
Verb agreement in graffiti
Spotted on the road this morning: a lorry with the usual graffiti scratched into the dirt on the back. It was a Tesco lorry, and someone had added 'is sh*te!' underneath the logo. However, the 'is' had been scratched out by a later, more pedantic fingertip and replaced with 'are'.
A graffiti artist who had read Tesco's style guide?
A graffiti artist who had read Tesco's style guide?
Monday 19 February 2007
The iTunes corpus
I can't live without music. More importantly, I can't write without it. It feeds me. An iPod is a thousand muses in your pocket. When working on a vibrant, energetic tone of voice, I have a specific playlist full of bouncy, hollertastic toons that leave me wanting to headbut things, drive too fast and scribble like a weasel. It's difficult to write upbeat with downbeat accompaniment.
While working on my last blog (about how some formal terms may be widely understood), I remembered that Substitute (one of those terms) by The Who is on my kneebouncing inyerface playlist. And some dedicated iPod stroking reveals more difficult-but-familiar terms. A quick trawl throws up Substitute for love by Madonna too. Another five minutes brings up delusions, apologies (quick! change it to sorry!), severance, sensuality, frustrations, crystalline, consequence, distractions, evolution, inertia, constellation, indigenous and lucidity.
The word formation is phenomenal. Beetlebum, anyone? Bodyrock? Cloudbusting? Hyperballad? Karmacoma? Sinsuality? Wearchest? Hooverphonic? There are Greek affixes in there, for goodness' sake. There are references to scentific theory (My selfish gene), sideways swipes at Shakespeare (Midsummer night's dreamin') and even - whisper who dares - Latin (Deus ibi est by Isobel Campbell, even if she does have a strange way of pronouncing 'est').
Juicy juxtapositions form a rich seam. Moonlight and mescaline, Morphine and chocolate, Goldfish and paracetamol, Coffee and TV.... perhaps I should rank them by active ingredient. I haven't even touched on the close-snipped poetry of some titles - Deep honey, Crawling with idiot, Indigenous syringes. And these are just the titles.*
I've chosen popular-ish artists from a middlebrow collection - I'm sure it would be easy to create a far more esoteric list. But I don't think I've ever seen an article exclaiming at the complexity of song titles or the literacy issues inherent in visiting HMV. Admittedly iTunes and Amazon - bless their hearts - help us out with a typo-spotting 'Did you really mean 'Argtyk Mynkkies'?' feature, which suggests that enough mis-spellings occur to warrant attention. And I know that you don't have to understand where Bohemia is or what a Rhapsody might be to appreciate the song. But it does show that our 'language environment' is liberally peppered with these complex terms and enigmatic metaphors. iTunes is only one example; every day we may use a 'percolator', make a 'connection', pay a 'congestion' charge or pick up a 'prescription' without breaking a Latin-phobic sweat.
I'm hardly suggesting trying out terms in iTunes before replacing them with simpler versions. Only that our (my) gut instinct to plain English any polysyllabically miscreant word can be tempered sometimes. Maybe. Carefully. A bit. But don't quote me.
*An honourable mention, by the way, when discussing song (and band) titles, has to go to 'If I had £1 for every stale song title I'd be 30 short of getting out of this mess' by Get cape. Wear cape. Fly.
While working on my last blog (about how some formal terms may be widely understood), I remembered that Substitute (one of those terms) by The Who is on my kneebouncing inyerface playlist. And some dedicated iPod stroking reveals more difficult-but-familiar terms. A quick trawl throws up Substitute for love by Madonna too. Another five minutes brings up delusions, apologies (quick! change it to sorry!), severance, sensuality, frustrations, crystalline, consequence, distractions, evolution, inertia, constellation, indigenous and lucidity.
The word formation is phenomenal. Beetlebum, anyone? Bodyrock? Cloudbusting? Hyperballad? Karmacoma? Sinsuality? Wearchest? Hooverphonic? There are Greek affixes in there, for goodness' sake. There are references to scentific theory (My selfish gene), sideways swipes at Shakespeare (Midsummer night's dreamin') and even - whisper who dares - Latin (Deus ibi est by Isobel Campbell, even if she does have a strange way of pronouncing 'est').
Juicy juxtapositions form a rich seam. Moonlight and mescaline, Morphine and chocolate, Goldfish and paracetamol, Coffee and TV.... perhaps I should rank them by active ingredient. I haven't even touched on the close-snipped poetry of some titles - Deep honey, Crawling with idiot, Indigenous syringes. And these are just the titles.*
I've chosen popular-ish artists from a middlebrow collection - I'm sure it would be easy to create a far more esoteric list. But I don't think I've ever seen an article exclaiming at the complexity of song titles or the literacy issues inherent in visiting HMV. Admittedly iTunes and Amazon - bless their hearts - help us out with a typo-spotting 'Did you really mean 'Argtyk Mynkkies'?' feature, which suggests that enough mis-spellings occur to warrant attention. And I know that you don't have to understand where Bohemia is or what a Rhapsody might be to appreciate the song. But it does show that our 'language environment' is liberally peppered with these complex terms and enigmatic metaphors. iTunes is only one example; every day we may use a 'percolator', make a 'connection', pay a 'congestion' charge or pick up a 'prescription' without breaking a Latin-phobic sweat.
I'm hardly suggesting trying out terms in iTunes before replacing them with simpler versions. Only that our (my) gut instinct to plain English any polysyllabically miscreant word can be tempered sometimes. Maybe. Carefully. A bit. But don't quote me.
*An honourable mention, by the way, when discussing song (and band) titles, has to go to 'If I had £1 for every stale song title I'd be 30 short of getting out of this mess' by Get cape. Wear cape. Fly.
The seasoning of latinate words
A quick thought, engendered as I finished making dinner a few nights ago. I found a George Orwell quote a while ago, which likened formal, Latinate words to a 'soft snow'... "A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. ". Rob Waller mentioned it on his blog at http://www.robwaller.org/blog/2006/12/soft-snow-of-latin-words_21.html
My idle thought as I polished up my pasta: are formalisms always there to blur? Aren't they sometimes a soft snow of Parmesan? A little seasoning, overwhelming in great quantity, and capable of ruining the entire experience, but also critical? As a delicate embellishment, they add a little savour to a plain dish. And we all know that readers will take more effort with text they find interesting. Do our mouthfilling syllables sometimes make texty text more tasty, a heartier dish?
I've spent many oodles of time removing Latinate words from texts, as all good plain Englishers should. But now that I'm a freelancer rather than a paid stooge, perhaps I can question some of the abiding commandments of plain English. So I can come clean: I've spent many hours trying to decode fiddly formalisms while thinking simmeringly that we're causing more problems by removing a familiar word or concept. Take 'substitution'. Nasty pointless Latinism, my instincts say, and a nominalisation to boot. I change it to 'change' with the barest thought. But is it really so hard? It turns up in every soccer game on every Saturday. It's a familiar concept, if not a familiar wordshape. It's not hard.
I've fought with clients to strip out 'deduction' while knowing that the people I'm writing to will (unfortunately) have seen plenty of them. I've battled with 'making an application' when the document we're working on is an application. And yes, it would be simpler as 'apply'. But sometimes, when you've danced around 'the form that came with this pack', you know - you absolutely know - that anyone who has a problem with understanding 'the enclosed form' is probably going to have more problems with the whole form-filling task than just finding the form.
Anathema and heresy. And yes I will have these battles for simplicity with clients again, and fight just as strongly to remove the -ations and -utions. Because it's hard enough convincing people that removing formalisms is worthwhile without diluting the message with exceptions. But sometimes, just sometimes, perhaps a sprinkling of Parmesan doesn't do that much harm.
My idle thought as I polished up my pasta: are formalisms always there to blur? Aren't they sometimes a soft snow of Parmesan? A little seasoning, overwhelming in great quantity, and capable of ruining the entire experience, but also critical? As a delicate embellishment, they add a little savour to a plain dish. And we all know that readers will take more effort with text they find interesting. Do our mouthfilling syllables sometimes make texty text more tasty, a heartier dish?
I've spent many oodles of time removing Latinate words from texts, as all good plain Englishers should. But now that I'm a freelancer rather than a paid stooge, perhaps I can question some of the abiding commandments of plain English. So I can come clean: I've spent many hours trying to decode fiddly formalisms while thinking simmeringly that we're causing more problems by removing a familiar word or concept. Take 'substitution'. Nasty pointless Latinism, my instincts say, and a nominalisation to boot. I change it to 'change' with the barest thought. But is it really so hard? It turns up in every soccer game on every Saturday. It's a familiar concept, if not a familiar wordshape. It's not hard.
I've fought with clients to strip out 'deduction' while knowing that the people I'm writing to will (unfortunately) have seen plenty of them. I've battled with 'making an application' when the document we're working on is an application. And yes, it would be simpler as 'apply'. But sometimes, when you've danced around 'the form that came with this pack', you know - you absolutely know - that anyone who has a problem with understanding 'the enclosed form' is probably going to have more problems with the whole form-filling task than just finding the form.
Anathema and heresy. And yes I will have these battles for simplicity with clients again, and fight just as strongly to remove the -ations and -utions. Because it's hard enough convincing people that removing formalisms is worthwhile without diluting the message with exceptions. But sometimes, just sometimes, perhaps a sprinkling of Parmesan doesn't do that much harm.
Friday 9 February 2007
Muffling in monochrome
Our brains like patterns, we're told. I spend a great deal of time, when training people in clear design, showing people how their brains like patterns. I show them optical illusions that encourage their eyes to fill in absent details - mess with their heads, essentially, to show them how we all spot patterns when there are none there.
The pattern of land when we return home from a journey brings a warm pink gladness to our cheeks. We glance eagerly from window to window of our car or train. Landfall; we are home.
So why, when the world is suddenly cuddled and cosied and woollied in snow, do we giggle with excitement at the lack of pattern, at the lack of familiarity? Is that the kerb? Where did the path go? There's a tree, a plantpot, a car under there somewhere...
Perhaps it's because Winter in monochrome, in straggled snaggly twigs and snow-flumped plumpness, is more pleasing than its muted full-colour variety. Bare trees and dead grass begin to make sense. It is appropriate, somehow. It goes.
And perhaps it's because this muffled blur is not so unfamiliar after all. The kerb is there; a couple of scuffs, a slight hollow, and we have it, with a thrill of sudden sense. The whole world has become a magic-eye puzzle for our magic brains to fathom. We fill in the absent details.
Tomorrow, in a muddled puddle of meltwater, its contours will emerge, become bland again. And the world will be dis-illusioned, will be self-explanatory once more.
The pattern of land when we return home from a journey brings a warm pink gladness to our cheeks. We glance eagerly from window to window of our car or train. Landfall; we are home.
So why, when the world is suddenly cuddled and cosied and woollied in snow, do we giggle with excitement at the lack of pattern, at the lack of familiarity? Is that the kerb? Where did the path go? There's a tree, a plantpot, a car under there somewhere...
Perhaps it's because Winter in monochrome, in straggled snaggly twigs and snow-flumped plumpness, is more pleasing than its muted full-colour variety. Bare trees and dead grass begin to make sense. It is appropriate, somehow. It goes.
And perhaps it's because this muffled blur is not so unfamiliar after all. The kerb is there; a couple of scuffs, a slight hollow, and we have it, with a thrill of sudden sense. The whole world has become a magic-eye puzzle for our magic brains to fathom. We fill in the absent details.
Tomorrow, in a muddled puddle of meltwater, its contours will emerge, become bland again. And the world will be dis-illusioned, will be self-explanatory once more.
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