So, you know.

Bye.

I wasn’t much help. As a child, I was instructed in the mysteries of ending faithfully or sincerely (“you can’t be sincere to a stranger”) but digital rules are bendier.

There’s mileage, I think, in unprefixed, first-name greetings, twinned with an ending “Thanks” or “All the best”. I’d reserve Cheers for friends; please do not hesitate to contact us – this might just be me – is a phrase I never use. It sounds too stiff, and I can’t shift the image of someone poised over a keyboard, all hunched and hesitant: “No, I WILL write, he specifically said not to hesitate … ”

Yours stinkily,

Patter.

Pricing is tricky: builders and plumbers have probably felt obliged, recently, to peg prices to stimulate business. Anecdotally, I know photographers, designers and copywriters definitely have.

Four years ago, Stella Artois stopped calling itself ‘reassuringly expensive’. But if you’re offering value while selling a high-quality service, the dilemma remains. In any given company, the belief persists that there’ll be someone there capable of taking professional-standard photos and/or writing professional-standard copy.

Q.   Why, in that context, would you bring in a high-priced outsider to do it?

A.   Again, anecdotally, you probably wouldn’t.

*  (I’ve checked, and of course there’s loads more – see below – to it. But don’t let that get in the way of my whingeing.)

I was hastily co-opted on to a team pitching for a job. The designer, web-builder, project manager and I  met the client to talk about why they should pick us.

A laptop was flipped open, up went a presentation: ”your’ for ‘you’re’, ‘there’ for their’, etc. My toes curled and my buttocks tightened. Doubt clouded client faces; those capable of single-eyebrow lifts lifted them. I’d never seen the presentation, but the client had just been told that copy was central to our pitch. Either we were lying, and it wasn’t, or it was, but the writer (me) was hopeless.

Also, the client’s name was only occasionally spelt correctly. Subsequent feedback revealed this alone was enough to lose the pitch.

Dull but true, pedantry pays.

But look at the manual:

The HPF SLOP (High Pass Filter Slope) Selects the HPF Slope (effective only when HPF FREQ is set to other than “OFF”).

And:

LPF FREQ (Low Pass Filter Frequency) Selects the subwoofer cut-off frequency: “50Hz”, “60Hz”, “80Hz”, “100Hz”, “120Hz”.

I can usually finesse new gadgetry’s settings to a minimal, but acceptable, degree. I just think a world-ranking techno-giant should aim higher when it comes to clarity and the translation of actions (twiddling) into outcomes (thumpier* bass).

They could use a copywriter (and I could use the work).

*Yes, I know. But you understood, right?

I’d love to pretend I’m so bold and maverick that, after collaborating with a designer, I could unveil to a client a brand featuring a drawing of a dead lion whose gaping abdomen is being colonised by bees, accompanied by an Old Testament quote (“out of the strong came forth sweetness”).

But I’m not, and few are. This seems to have been genuine, Victorian eccentricity on the part of Abraham Lyle, a man of strong religious beliefs.

Fresh proof that true eccentrics are precisely those who would never profess themselves to be anything of the sort.

The driver was delivering garden furniture. Got me thinking: this ‘supply chain’, what – in the words of the iffy stand-up – is THAT all about? Presumably, any delivery is the last link in a supply chain.

And what is it a solution to? What puzzle is it solving?

And what exactly is ‘Delivering’ doing there? The strapline says, effectively, ‘Delivering deliveries’, with a superfluous ‘solutions’ tagged on to look modern.

Straplines are tricky. I’ve sat in three-hour meetings and received dozens of pages from clients wanting their business summarised in four words. They’re rarely easy, especially if you’re keen to avoid the obvious.

Patter: the stinkiest just got stinkier.

Stinky Patter: delivering words-related solutions.

(Give me a minute, I feel a meeting coming on.)

Some things, however, are just beyond me.

I can not action a plan.

I can not incentivise* anyone.

I can not blue-sky anything.

If asked to unpack an idea, I risk unpicking it, and vice versa.

I even struggle to think of touching base with anyone without suppressing a snarky** 15 year old’s giggle.

*      At the risk of dimness: could incentivise just as easily have grown up to be incentivate?

**    See, snarky‘s newish, and works. (Though one dictionary agrees, and cites late 20th century derivation, another one went all 1906 Lower German and Swedish on me.)

But woolliness gets a bad press. Complex problems – such as those politicians are paid to ponder – aren’t amenable to the kind of ‘clear, sharp’ thinking which so often translates as ‘dim, binary’ thinking. Interviewers crave certainty (‘Come on, answer Yes or No’); phone-ins demand simplicity (‘Text Good Thing or Bad Thing now, standard message rates apply’); public figures are Legends or Losers, Gods or Monsters.

In this context, ambiguity, difficulty and nuance are men of a certain age in ill-fitting cardies, pitted against the twenty-something tautness of obvious, clear-cut and no-brainer.

It’s not wildly exciting, the realisation that to age is to make friends with your ignorance; words which make uncertainty sound young and attractive are, correspondingly, rare.

Clearly, ‘woolly’ needs rebranding.

Tough job, that.

Loads of us workshop now. We make bureaucracy physical, delivering outcomes using spanner-less toolkits. We drive projects forward, like we’re bent double with coal-blackened faces, rather than writing emails and staring out of windows. Strategies must be robust, as though built to withstand storms rather than the carping of team-leaders.

Our working generation tries to give its sedentary, soft-fleshed existence the sheen of physical effort by co-opting the language of industrialised muscle (the whiff of brawn brought to an arena some perceive as mimsy and feminised).

Maybe we crave honest toil and practical nous.

Or perhaps we prefer an ideas-shower with a wellbeing facilitator in a knowledge spa.

‘Hardworking’ smacks of US politics, and the ‘hardworking poor’. By Clinton’s time, poverty had become so inherently shameful that to align yourself with the undescribed poor was to risk aligning yourself with the feckless and lazy. (How could ANYONE be poor in the face of such trickling-down opportunity?)

It’d be nice to see a politician brave enough to represent the not-wilfully-indolent-but-not-wildly-hardworking: it can get a bit pious, this constant slog and industry.

“It’s time we gave real hope to millions of families up and down our country, families who don’t work all hours, families without savings or ponies or second jobs or private education, just ordinary families where people work quite hard, then go home with the simple, admirable aim of not doing that much else.”

Count the media interviewees routinely starting an answer – any answer – with “Look … ” or  “Ah, look … “

Its use flourished when Australia kept winning everything; it seemed linked to ‘focus’, and that never-beaten Aussie spirit. Their politicians started copying it, now ours do, too, as well as our sportspeople.

It’s the language of contradiction and confrontation. You or I might use it when exasperated  (“Look, I’ve asked you three times to tidy your room … “) but to your never-say-die, wannabe Oz it’s verbal soup before the answer’s main course: “Ricky, you must be delighted: another century … “  “Look, of course I am, but the thing is …”

It’s odd; friendliness met with instant dispute.

“You want a coffee?”

“WHAT IF I DO? (I’ll have it black, no sugar, ta.)”

“Blimey”, I said, “what’s going on?”

“Complete internal vertical restack,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Complete internal vertical restack.”

“Oh.”

They were rearranging the office’s layout. The same way you might move the sofa, re-arrange the chairs, shift the tv. To me and you: “moving things round”, to the corporate mindset: a “complete internal vertical restack”.

Enough things in life are hard to describe without mystifying what’s simple with wilfully obscure language. Especially when the obscurity’s aim is to make something mundane sound complex and grand.

So said Nick Cave; and an author whose name I’ve forgotten described editing more luridly as ‘killing your babies’.

Some people hire copywriters because they want someone to buff and rearrange their words. Often what’s needed is someone disinterested – not uninterested – and wielding big scissors.

We’re all guilty of banging on once our teeth sink into the marrowbone of our favourite topic. It’s not disreputable or surprising for a business owner to overtell their company’s history on a website (that history’s part of their life, after all). It’s understandable, but not advisable.

A copywriter brandishing scissors is like chopping the egregious guitar solo blighting the three-minute pop single, cutting the overlong battle scene from the blockbuster, slicing the flabby 20-page dream sequence from the novel: dirty work, but someone’s got to do it.

(If any subscribers were notified twice about this blog, my apologies. It was scheduled to appear in the afternoon but, for some reason, appeared immediately, late in the evening. My fault, no doubt. I’m still tinkering with the publish-it-later options, bear with me … )

I can never take them seriously. Masculinity – the expressions imply – equals stoicism, strength and courage (the quiet kind’s best). If someone’s whining, crying on your shoulder or otherwise just not getting on with it (all the preserve of over-sensitive, over-chatty women) the remedy for such testosterone-deficit is to behave more mannishly.

Which era’s mannishness, though: the 2011 version, Man 2.0? Or the version from some lost golden age, populated by tight-lipped, thick-skinned, Cro-Magnon hybrids of John Wayne, Vinny Jones and Captain Scott?

Presumably, you need to man up and/or grow a pair before you can even dream of stepping up to the plate, taking one for the team or putting your hand up and coming to the party.

A football manager, Howard Wilkinson (ascetic, Yorkshire, blunt, shrewd), once said of an ex-employee, Eric Cantona (French, faux-profound, self-proclaimed artiste and provocateur): “Eric wanted to turn up, do what he wants, then fuck off. Well, we’d all like some of that.” His point: life’s not that simple, unless you’re pathologically selfish (or a baby).

Or Samsung, of course. Live life on your terms. Do what you want when you want, it’s all about you: that small plastic briquette in your hand is not, it turns out, a phone with ideas above its station, it’s a way to get all your needs met.

And what could be  more important than that?

Text-speak, acronyms and digital-shorthand mutate quickly with a kind of fast-forward Darwinism. Hence “electronic mail” (the same ” … ” which once wrapped “hit parade” or “instant” coffee) becomes e-mail, then email. Advice to google it would have seemed wilfully geeky ten years ago, now there can’t be many more widely used verbs.

I’m less busy than many, but can’t resist btw (by the way), although draw the line at iirc (if I remember correctly). At least it’s unpronounceable, unlike lol (which I’ve heard under-16s use out loud in response to something funny) or seeb (the ultimate: cba is can’t be arsed, and if you can’t be arsed to say cba you say seeb).

Ok.

GTG.

BRB.

As a chronic late-adopter, I risk sounding like Grandpa wibbling on about gramophones (I also get that Twitter’s not just micro-slebs and their burnt-me-toast / messy-night / I-heart-Glee updates) but for 98% (made-up figure) of users there’s the smallest chance of breaking anything interesting in those 140 characters.

A footballer’s fed up with a manager, an MP calls his/her leader feeble, a breakfast DJ says he wants to quit; but for us, the great unfollowed, getting on our tiny wooden boxes with our pocket-megaphones is like turning up at Speakers’ Corner at 4am to shout at the empty night and the wind-blown litter.

I get the irony of saying such things while blogging, and my word-limit was deliberate (Blog + Tweet = Bleet) but if 98% do follow 2%, does that mean Twitter’s not what it set out to be?

Moonpig’s founder was called Moonpig at school; Google was moonpig-free prior to his company’s inception.

When I work on namings, I’m often surprised by the ideas clients like and dislike. Although methods exist for this kind of thing, instinct often rules, as with children’s names. Introduce a toddler as Blodwyn-Shanice* and people react to the toddler. Tell people you’re thinking of calling your baby Blodwyn-Shanice and you might struggle for eye-contact.

Anyway, I’ve been researching. Cheesewolf is universally available but not as .co.uk; Barry albatross, and Sponge volcano are untaken anywhere; but if your heart was set on Blue tomato or Sugarhorse, forget it.

*No offence, ‘Wyn.

The point of something like this – assuming for a generous moment it has a point, obviously – must be to dash off something pithy and self-contained. The problem (sorry, the challenge … ) is the temptation to tinker, back-track, revise.

I started this blog at a trot and told almost no one about it until there were a few posts, but I couldn’t stop myself returning to my log-in to buff, primp and generally edit the hell out of everything.

A time-limit has to be the only way to go. Once I let on this place exists and – in theory – it begins to be read, the rule will be: write it, publish it, leave it.

Never go back.