Quick, before the Feds kick down my door—let me tell you a story.
This is a case of alleged corruption, unproven fraud, and suspected malfeasance…all made possible by a small grammatical ambiguity.
What if I told you that a missing comma nearly let me slip away with half a million dollars of ill-gotten taxpayer money? Well, “slip away” might be the wrong way to put it—the questionable actions can be justified as perfectly legal…from a certain point of view.
Where to begin?
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October is here at last, and the witching hour of Halloween spooks and specters is drawing near. As I began to write, I figured there was no better time to address one of the most frightening aspects of many business’s marketing strategies:
Bad content management.
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18 08 2015
Stop Trying to Sell Me Things
I averted my eyes from a billboard while driving on the highway today. I won’t pretend like I did it for the sake of keeping my eyes on the road; I did it out of principle. I’m still not sure what it was advertising, though if the previous twenty I had already seen were any indication, it was likely a brief but nevertheless compelling argument for why my current insurance provider was inadequate.
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I stared at my bowl of soup.
The floating fish head stared back.
As I locked eyes with the fishy compatriot that was supposed to be my dinner, the only thought in my head was:
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Q: What do landing the perfect job, finding your ideal mate, and winning friends all have in common?
A: They all require you to know how to market yourself.
Yes, it’s the reason people sweat interviews (and first dates), spend hours drafting cover letters, and even pay others to assemble their résumés — we don’t always know the best way to sell ourselves. Marketing yourself is an essential skill to get where you want to go, but the process is often easier said than done.
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When the phrase “extinction” is inevitably brought up in polite conversation, there’s a good chance that the first topics that jump into people’s minds are the declining mountain gorilla population or the sorry lack of Mexican grizzly bears in today’s wilderness.
Well, those may not be the primary examples that normal people usually consider, but the sad truth is that extinctions are silently occurring on a level far removed from many people’s minds—the extinction of language!
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The prevalence of homonyms in the English language is significant, almost as if homonyms were some deliberate linguistic choice designed to frustrate native speakers and secondary language students alike. A piece of peace, the imminent capital in the eminent capitol, a man you meet seen whining at a wine and meat scene. For those unfamiliar with the subtleties of the English vocabulary, it can be enough to make you bang your head against the wall.
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Envision a gothic fantasy tale, with a blood-sucking horror sitting at a piano. His cold, pale hands dance over the white, glistening keys of the ancient instrument as his haggard, wet breath exits his chest in a tremendous gray cloud of cold, damp vapor.
Your skin may have crawled a little while reading that, but not because the tremendous number of descriptors painted a vivid picture in your mind. In fact, you may have even been distracted by how many words were used to say something so simple. This is an example of the danger of over-reliance on adjectives in your descriptions.
