To continue… June 27, 2008
Posted by drew in Blog.Tags: semantics, word pairs
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We put our bins out every Tuesday night. Last Wednesday, as we were driving around the neighbourhood, we got stuck behind the rubbish truck as it plodded from house to house, hoisting big bins aloft and emptying their contents into its big rubbish hole. My travelling companion read the notice on the back of the truck.
Caution: vehicle continually stopping
She said “shouldn’t that say continuously?”
It’s one of those tricky pairs of words, where each word means something very similar. To continue is to maintain, keep up or not cease an action. Continually and continuously both convey this basic meaning but there’s an important distinction to be made between the two.
When speaking of an action, if it goes on without cessation, then it’s continuous. Conversely, if the action happens, then happens again, and again, and keeps happening, then it’s continual.
For example, say you had a faulty smoke alarm that wouldn’t stop beeping.
A continual beep would be: beeeeep… beeeeep… beeeeep… beeeeep… beeeeep… beeeeep… and so on.
But a continuous beep would be: beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee… and so on.
So yes, the rubbish truck stops continually. I try to picture it stopping continuously and think of it in one long, never-ending process of slowing down: a kind of Xeno’s paradox of deceleration, halving its speed every second but never actually coming to a complete standstill. An image that continues to be weird.
Words is… June 26, 2008
Posted by drew in Blog.Tags: agreement, expertise, language, plural, semantics, syntax
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I saw a flyer recently for a company that offers writing services: much the same thing I do.
Without mentioning names, as I’m not interested in undermining or maligning any competition, I was interested in their opening sentence:
Words are a very important tool.
Of course, I work as a writer and was shown this flyer in my capacity as a writer, so the first thing I did was to pick apart the grammar, noticing the non-agreement of number. If the verb to be functions as a big equals sign, if we have a plural as the subject, we should also be looking for a plural as an object.
But is it wrong?
The first thing I’d ask myself is whether there are instances where a plural noun can ‘be’ a corresponding singular noun; then I’d ask whether there are any other kinds of tools that are made of multiple parts.
On the first question, we could have the sentence Those three guys are a trio. So, its syntax is fine. Whether a tool can be something plural, that’s a semantic question. Obviously, a trio is something made up of multiple entities. A tool, I”m not so sure about. I’d even argue that nails are individual tools (if they’re even tools at all: a hammer is a tool. What then, is a nail).
So for me at least, it fails semantically. And as a writer, I wouldn’t want that kind of ambiguity being so out there and obvious, especially on a promotional piece spruiking my professional services. Choosing your words carefully can bring out so much more meaning in your langage.
Because language is a very important tool.
Have a great day June 23, 2008
Posted by drew in Uncategorized.Tags: branding
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On a recent trip to Melbourne, I noticed a busker outside the National Gallery of Victoria. It was a guy, probably in his 70s, dressed in smart clothes that had seen better days: an old woollen overcoat, coloured scarf and cloth cap. He had that close-jawed smile that suggested a loss of teeth, and dentures, and had what seemed to be his worldly possessions in one of those shopping carts you might take to the produce markets.
He was playing the harmonica, not particularly well but he held a tune and he tried to engage passers-by, making eye contact, winking and smiling between verses.
He had a sign affixed to the top of his shopping cart, which read
Smile, be happy and
have a great day
Photo’s $2.00
And I thought ‘His punctuation needs help but that guy gets marketing’.
Toning it down June 5, 2008
Posted by drew in Blog.add a comment
I know of a company that somtimes hired a professional copywriter to come up with ad headlines and slogans. He charged top dollar for what he did, which was fair enough: he was in high demand and provided a very good product.
Most of the time.
Sometimes (not that often, though) he’d be a little bit off the mark. He’d do the work, put the time into reflecting on the brief, come up with a lot of ideas, refine those ideas and present this company with several options. But for whatever reason—a misinterpretation of the brief, an inference taken from a throwaway comment, whatever—he didn’t quite hit the mark with the tone. And the work wasn’t terrible; it wasn’t thrown back in his face; he wasn’t run out of town. He just didn’t quite hit the mark.
It happens.
Now, the company didn’t want to spend any more on the expensive copywriter so that he might go back (for another hour or two) and get it right. Instead, they gave the job to the employee that books the ads, who reworked it and got the tone right. But in doing so, made the copy grammatically incorrect, making a subject/object agreement error that wasn’t immediately apparent to the client who was just checking for tone by this stage.
The ad went to print and, of course, the error was picked up later. (Which is too late.)
The moral of the story is that good copywriters put more into their work than just cool ideas. They care about syntax, they worry about semantics and they pore over every conjunction or preposition.
Getting the tone spot-on 100% of the time is a bonus.
(As an aside, someone once asked me what difference a preposition could make to the meaning of a sentence. I offered “I just threw out last night’s dinner” vs “I just threw up last night’s dinner”.)
