Choose Your Words Carefully

OR, WHEN ICE CREAM IS NOT ICE CREAM

It should be apparent to regular readers that Hexhamite adores words. Seeking new ways to express the mundane is a mission and a passion. Why call a spade a spade when you can call it a sturdy flat bladed excavator that can be pushed into the earth with the foot? I'll take loquacious over humdrum every time. Verbosity over bland suits me fine thank you. Exploring the beauty, complexities and flexibility of old Mother Tongue is a journey of adventure and constant source of delight. Her abuse wounds me.

Ergo, copywriting is a trade that is close to my heart - the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. It is skill and an art. Yet I recurrently find myself poring over adverts and notices and wondering if they were composed by a machine. Or perhaps a party of indolent primates hammering away at old typewriters in a back room somewhere?

I am bewildered by the profusion of pseudo-scientific claptrap, poor grammar and idiotically inappropriate use of words in the media. What exactly does “Pimp my Ride” mean? Or Bifidus Digestum? Or all those ridiculous made up ingredients in cosmetic products?

Queueing at the Xpress (No!!) checkout of my local greengrocer, Hexhamite muses that being au fait with language and grammar should rate highly on the list of requirements for a career in Marketing. Judging by the sign above the cash register this is transparently not the case.

“Fifteen items or less” screams the sign. The grinding of my teeth is audible from three aisles away as I growl, “Fifteen items or fewer!” One or two dullards may look at me strangely, but unless His Holiness, Stephen Fry happens to be standing behind me with his weekly grocery shop, it is unlikely that anyone will understand my rancour. Bring back the Grammar Nazis!

A recent promotion in a local deep fried chicken outlet (the one with the bearded fellow on the logo) caught my eye. Cadbury's Flake Avalanche Only 99p!

This is a tub of plain ice cream sprinkled with pieces of the well known erotic confectionery. Nothing remarkable in that. The carefully thought out small print made for interesting reading though – i.e. the rubbish that advertisers are compelled to append to their lies to fend off potential law suits.

It read, “At participating restaurants only. Product and price may vary.” Are they serious? The first sentence is reasonable. Apart from the use of the term restaurant, that is. But the second?

How can the product and price possibly vary? Are they suggesting that I could be presented with a rubber boot and charged a shiny farthing? The promotion is for ice cream, with a flake topping, priced at 99p. If any of those criteria vary then logically it is a different promotion.

Advertisers, think before you type! You haven't got the brains to be clever - stick with the tried and tested “subject to availability.”

Language is my mistress, treat her courteously.

Recycling the O2 Way

OR HOW TO SOLVE POVERTY IN THE THIRD WORLD

With great fanfare the iPhone 4 has arrived and naturally, being a metrosexual technophile, Hexhamite is among the first to have acquired one. The Blackberry Curve was just soooo passé. Given the absurd levels of attention focussed on alleged reception problems and the ludicrously minuscule stocks supplied to the UK's telecommunication vendors, you might be forgiven for thinking that this weeks rant is about the iPhone.  Not so. iPhone 4  is superb. End of.

It is the “recycling” of the said defunct Blackberry that has me vexed. Let's be clear, recycling is good. Recycling is heartily approved of. Earth's resources are precious and must be preserved. My mobile telephone provider is to be energetically commended for their promise not to send any part of my old phone to landfill. Cynics argue that given the concentration of gold and other precious minerals contained in a typical handset, they are perhaps not as magnanimous as it might first appear. Meh!

How does recycling work? In a nutshell, Hexhamite sends off his old handset to O2 (for it is they of whom I speak) and in return they send a fistful of cash as a “reward” for my environmental conscientiousness. If the phone is still in working condition O2 send it off to “needy people in Africa”.

Err..excuse me? Has the definition of poverty in the third world been revised since last I checked? Has famine and water shortage been eradicated? The AIDS pandemic cured, political instability resolved and genocide curtailed perhaps? Am I the only person seeing the stark raving incongruity here?

Having spent many years in darkest Africa, Hexhamite has seen first hand the hardship and deprivation suffered by many Africans. Where people live in tin shacks with no running water and a pair of secondhand shoes is a luxury. The third world has immeasurable problems and the west has a moral duty to lend assistance, but  are we helping by foisting our redundant gadgets on them? “Terribly sorry to hear about the cholera old chap. No sorry, can't offer you any food or medicine but here's a shiny new smart phone!”

What are they expected to do with these things? Africa is a continent vast beyond imagination, with virtually no mobile telecommunications infrastructure. Many people live hundreds of miles from electricity. Reception from one side of Hexhamite's house to the other is patchy, and a few miles out of town is non-existent, so what is the coverage in Africa or the Indian subcontinent likely to be? Zero? Zilch? Nada conceivably?

Perhaps the idea was dreamed up by those fellows from the Orange commercials, where films are re-imagined to place the mobile at the heart of the plot. Slumdog Millionaire anyone? “I say Jamal, look at my spiffing new Blackberry. Why don't you get your arse on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and win enough money to build a telephone mast and a house where I can plug my charger in?”

Priorities: food, water, shelter.  Hello, anybody there?

Chicane Chicanery

It is universally acknowledged that Hexhamite is a superb driver. The King of the Road. Poop! Poop! Schumacher bows before my prowess at the wheel while the Stig is not fit to kiss my bumper.

Okay, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. However, it is fair to say that I know how to handle a car, I know the Highway Code and I know when I have right-of-way. It seems sometimes that I am the only one.

As a dutiful son, I make a point of paying regular visits to my sprightly old Mater. Reaching the matriarchal pile involves driving along a meandering avenue, which the powers-that-be have determined poses a “road safety risk”. That being, children who enjoy a game of football in the road stand a good chance of falling under the wheels of a passing motorist.

In the dim and distance past our schools used to teach us that re-enacting the cup final on a busy thoroughfare is generally a bad idea and Darth Vader taught us the Green Cross Code to avoid unnecessary splattage. Roads were understood to be the domain of the motor vehicle, which made them dangerous places to play.

In these more enlightened times of course we think differently. Two legs good, four wheels bad and all that. The motorist is a menace who should be discouraged from using the roads at all costs.

Which is why the functionaries at Town Hall have installed a series of double chicanes along the mile long approach to the home of Hexhamite's grande dame. The theory goes that, by being made to weave through these obstacles cars will be forced to slow down. Naturally the boy racers see them as a challenge to be navigated at top speed. Q.E.D.

Each set of chicanes is accompanied by road signs at either end, indicating which lane has priority. This is to avoid drivers meeting bumper to bumper in the middle. Simple? Yes, if drivers actually understood what the signs mean! A cursory perusal of the Highway Code makes clear that priority applies across the whole distance between the two signs. If a car is already in the chicane section, then he has priority irrespective of what the sign says. So why do the road hogs come whizzing round the corner, see the priority sign and plough headlong toward the vehicle trying to leave the section?

Notoriously susceptible to road rage, Hexhamite has stopped remonstrating with the clowns who claim to have right-of-way when they do not. Now I simply switch off the engine and start reading the Telegraph, thus blocking the entire street. My opponents may curse until they are blue in the face, but they always concede defeat and back up to allow me to pass.

Drivers should realise that the chicanes are a road safety measure, not a game of chicken. Playing brinkmanship with Hexhamite in vexed mode is like playing Russian roulette with a bullet in every chamber. Not recommend. Poop! Poop!