May 18th, 2008 Posted in Business, Creativity

Pointless words and slogans

Korzybski’s Science and Sanity has got me thinking about the semantics of daily life.  Some say it doesn’t matter, but I feel it does.  I don’t want to be bombarded by meaningless communications.  Today’s pointless words are as follows:

  • “Fully” – Often used when it is not actually true, or cannot even be true. Example – Putting “fully modified” in  a car advert.  What is “fully” modified? There is no standard to measure this against. Nonsense.
  • “Affordable” – Again, there is no fixed point to measure this against. Who can afford it? Millionnaires? Tramps?
  • “Budget” – Often used to denote the cheapest version of something.  A budget can be large or small. Over use of this word turns its use into nonsense.
  • “Relationship” – When used only to denote a romantic relationship.  Any two people that exist have a relationship. People need to be more specific.  Even when actually talking about what is commonly called a romantic relationship, nobody seems to know what that means to them aside from the cultural norm of dating, sleeping together, then living together as pseudofriends that try and control each other (but I digress, that is a separate issue).

Closely related to meaningless conversation are advertising slogans.  Now I don’t have a problem with advertising or slogans in principle, just when it has no actual meaning.  Take a mythical but realistic example:

  • Chris Smith Builders – Doing it right every time (usually in some curly bullshit script font, possibly WordArt)

Ok Chris Smith, you are telling me nothing by this apart from that you have no imagination and don’t value your business enough to employ a designer to sort out your only public facing communication.  People judge you on first impressions.  Get a name, and a considered tagline.  Get your design laid out by a designer, not your mate Dave.  It will only cost you a couple of hundred pounds, probably a day’s profit for you.

As far as the tagline goes, doing WHAT? How is the QUALITY of that action measured? Are you really doing it right EVERY time? That is unlikely.  Taglines make me weep.  A good one will convey the whole philosophy of the business in one snappy sentence.  A bad one is just a waste of letters.