So having declared that you can make pretty much any noun work as a verb, I discovered a fairly extreme case in point in this morning's post.
If you declare that your car is off the road, you make a Statutory Off Road Notification, or SORN. The DVLA has very happily turned this - or at least the abbreviation - into a verb. So you can now walk into your friendly local post office and ask to sorn your car. The notice you receive from DVLA suggests that you 'Relicense [and thank you for spelling this correctly] or SORN online or by phone'. It's interesting that they keep the capitals.
Anyway, it has led me to suggest a small modification to my own rule. If you were to spell the abbreviation out in full, DVLA would be suggesting that you Statutory Off Road Notification online. And obviously that nominalisation there, already having been catapulted from the land of verb to the kingdom of noun, ain't going to be too happy to make a return trip. So perhaps nominalisations should be excused games, having once performed grammatical backflips.
Tuesday, 18 September 2007
Monday, 3 September 2007
More reasons to love The Onion
As if we needed more reason to love them.
1 - Gratuitous mentions of monsters. Monsters are pretty much my favourite thing. I'm particularly fond of using the word as a verb, which is more grist to my theory that you can use pretty much any noun in English as a verb and people will know what you mean – eg 'can I window your diary'? It's only a matter of time before that catches on.
2 - Naming of hurricanes. I was talking to someone just the other day about hurricane names and how we wouldn't be too alarmed if Hurricane Tim was threatening our shores - and dang it if they haven't written a whole essay on the subject.
3 - Anyone who sells t-shirts with the slogan 'I Appreciate The Muppets On A Much Deeper Level Than You' deserves plentiful oodles of love and devotion. I'll even forgive them their capitalisation.
1 - Gratuitous mentions of monsters. Monsters are pretty much my favourite thing. I'm particularly fond of using the word as a verb, which is more grist to my theory that you can use pretty much any noun in English as a verb and people will know what you mean – eg 'can I window your diary'? It's only a matter of time before that catches on.
2 - Naming of hurricanes. I was talking to someone just the other day about hurricane names and how we wouldn't be too alarmed if Hurricane Tim was threatening our shores - and dang it if they haven't written a whole essay on the subject.
3 - Anyone who sells t-shirts with the slogan 'I Appreciate The Muppets On A Much Deeper Level Than You' deserves plentiful oodles of love and devotion. I'll even forgive them their capitalisation.
Monday, 23 July 2007
Just not necessary
"Call us with your bank details and don't worry – we'll update your Direct Debit for you. All you need to do is relax."
Well, I'm afraid I've decided not to relax. I've decided to have a little rant.
Of course you'll update my Direct Debit. It's your (company's) job. And as far as I can see, it ain't hard. You're not doing me a massive favour. I'm not about to put my feet up with a cup of chamomile and fondly imagine that you're diligently writing a lengthy missive in finest copperplate and/or A negative, and delivering it to my home branch on windswept horseback, perhaps following an extended chase scene with impending wolves and yetis. I don't think the world's a better place because you're in it.
I'm really not impressed. It's 14 characters on an online form.
It's not because you're making an everest out of the everyday. It's not even because the last time I updated my Direct Debit details, you continued to debit the wrong account for six months. It's because you've added that text for the sake of it. You're bigging up something that's inherently unbigupable. Someone, somewhere (and I don't think it was anyone I know) suggested that your tone of voice was friendly and chatty, and so you're clutching at every conceivable opportunity to add some fluffiness.
It goes along with "we'd be delighted to help in any way we can". (No you won't be delighted. You'll be moderately cheery at best.) Or "we're happy to tell you we'll be sending your vouchers soon!" (Well, I'm glad you're happy, but I signed up to this card to get the vouchers, so they're not exactly coming as a great big birthday-cake-shaped surprise).
It's pointless. It's making me unnecessarily testy on a fine July afternoon. I had to tut twice, and I'm using more italic than I normally do in a year. The fact that you're claiming you can correctly fill in a form on-screen is not, not, not building my brand loyalty. The company that sent me a nastily type-set, terse, but factually correct letter within a day confirming my details, and then correctly switched my bank account without a murmur – you know what? They got my vote.
I'm currently visualising you as an unpleasantly over-familiar uncle. Probably one who's about to reverse into my car while gurning clammily out of the window.
I bet that wasn't in your brand guidelines.
Well, I'm afraid I've decided not to relax. I've decided to have a little rant.
Of course you'll update my Direct Debit. It's your (company's) job. And as far as I can see, it ain't hard. You're not doing me a massive favour. I'm not about to put my feet up with a cup of chamomile and fondly imagine that you're diligently writing a lengthy missive in finest copperplate and/or A negative, and delivering it to my home branch on windswept horseback, perhaps following an extended chase scene with impending wolves and yetis. I don't think the world's a better place because you're in it.
I'm really not impressed. It's 14 characters on an online form.
It's not because you're making an everest out of the everyday. It's not even because the last time I updated my Direct Debit details, you continued to debit the wrong account for six months. It's because you've added that text for the sake of it. You're bigging up something that's inherently unbigupable. Someone, somewhere (and I don't think it was anyone I know) suggested that your tone of voice was friendly and chatty, and so you're clutching at every conceivable opportunity to add some fluffiness.
It goes along with "we'd be delighted to help in any way we can". (No you won't be delighted. You'll be moderately cheery at best.) Or "we're happy to tell you we'll be sending your vouchers soon!" (Well, I'm glad you're happy, but I signed up to this card to get the vouchers, so they're not exactly coming as a great big birthday-cake-shaped surprise).
It's pointless. It's making me unnecessarily testy on a fine July afternoon. I had to tut twice, and I'm using more italic than I normally do in a year. The fact that you're claiming you can correctly fill in a form on-screen is not, not, not building my brand loyalty. The company that sent me a nastily type-set, terse, but factually correct letter within a day confirming my details, and then correctly switched my bank account without a murmur – you know what? They got my vote.
I'm currently visualising you as an unpleasantly over-familiar uncle. Probably one who's about to reverse into my car while gurning clammily out of the window.
I bet that wasn't in your brand guidelines.
Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Having the time to be brief
"I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter." – Blaise Pascal.
It's probably the most relevant quote I've ever found for what I do. I'm constantly asked to shorten, shorten, shorten. It drives me crazy.
Often it's for my own good. It's all too easy to have pen haemorrhage. I blame the 'hump' you need to struggle over when you are writing difficult text. You struggle in knee-trembling first gear up the steep learning curve, crest the hill of your topic, and... WHEEEEEE...... you could write for ages with the metaphorical wind in your hair. You accelerate; bring in the quirky sentence fragments, the rising cadences, the thought-catching oxymoron. Don't even need to pedal.
And then a client - who is often glancing at twenty pages in a half-hour meeting - thinks it looks too wordy. Don't they get the pretty wordplay? Don't they see how the word 'scout' in paragraph 47 cleverly references the notion of 'being prepared' in paragraph 8? Don't they appreciate the gentle, careful build-build of verbs from rational to emotive nuances?
No.
Time to hit the delete key. A lot. It's a bloodbath of darlings as they submit to Word's dinky scissor icon.
It will be worth it in the end. The client was right; no-one would have read it. But for ever after, you won't be able to read that text without the ghosts of your creativity wraithing before your eyes.
Blogs are ace.
No clients.
It's probably the most relevant quote I've ever found for what I do. I'm constantly asked to shorten, shorten, shorten. It drives me crazy.
Often it's for my own good. It's all too easy to have pen haemorrhage. I blame the 'hump' you need to struggle over when you are writing difficult text. You struggle in knee-trembling first gear up the steep learning curve, crest the hill of your topic, and... WHEEEEEE...... you could write for ages with the metaphorical wind in your hair. You accelerate; bring in the quirky sentence fragments, the rising cadences, the thought-catching oxymoron. Don't even need to pedal.
And then a client - who is often glancing at twenty pages in a half-hour meeting - thinks it looks too wordy. Don't they get the pretty wordplay? Don't they see how the word 'scout' in paragraph 47 cleverly references the notion of 'being prepared' in paragraph 8? Don't they appreciate the gentle, careful build-build of verbs from rational to emotive nuances?
No.
Time to hit the delete key. A lot. It's a bloodbath of darlings as they submit to Word's dinky scissor icon.
It will be worth it in the end. The client was right; no-one would have read it. But for ever after, you won't be able to read that text without the ghosts of your creativity wraithing before your eyes.
Blogs are ace.
No clients.
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
Addressing the company
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'...
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, 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.
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