Messages

Having been involved in running little businesses for a couple of decades I tend to notice business messages and slogans, and having spent too long proof-reading documentation in my formative years, I tend to notice mistakes and quirks in them. Unfortunately, this combination merely serves to make me cross with the daft things that businesses say. Here are a few I have recorded:

Typos

An Irish give-away

I must have looked at this window a dozen times before I noticed the typo. What is half price? To this day I'm not sure if the owners realise what they have written.

The Queen's English

When I first saw this sign directing visitors to the Royal Windsor Horse Show, I started wondering whether the only horsebox owners who could turn right were those who had first removed their bales.  

But no, an almost identical sign further along (click the tiny one to the right) showed that the Queen's proofreaders were the ones needing disbaling. Orff with their heads.

Too bee or not too bee

This is a photo of the side of a van that pulled up outside the Windsor MBE. Thanks to Charlie of www.windsorthismonth.com for pointing it out.

Ignore for the moment the poor and inconsistent formatting of the phone numbers and look instead at the shortest and simplest word in the message. What are they implying about their clients? Don't sign-writers ever employ proofreaders?

Pull the other one

Another type of irritation is when the corporate slogan just doesn't fit the organisation. How about:

What is being implied, other than an inability to capitalise correctly? Presumably, that when the Royal Mail take your letters from you, they consider them so important they take personal care of them until delivery. Hmmm - don't think so. Without wanting to have a go at individual posties, many of whom I know do an excellent job, the organisation as a whole loses, mis-routes, damages and mis-delivers such a proportion of the mail that you can be sure they aren't taking personal care of anything. Unless the slogan refers to losing things on purpose in a Mitchell brothers sort of way...

You what?

Another irritation is slogans that make no sense. How about ParcelForce - the power to deliver. What does it mean? They have the power to deliver? What power? The permission to deliver? The ability to deliver? If so, how are they the UK's most unrespected delivery company? Or are they delivering power?

It says it twice and repeats itself

Being a pedantic ex-proofreader, I get wound up by things like this.

So what's wrong with this? Well, FedEx is a contraction of Federal Express. So the message on the engine, and every FedEx van in the world it seems, is "Federal Express Express". It's daft. Mind you, it's not as bad as an example from my youth. I once worked for Acorn Computers who launched a computer called "The Acorn ARM Computer". ARM at that time was an acronym for "Acorn RISC Machine" and RISC stood for "Reduced Instruction Set Computer". So expand it all out and you get "The Acorn Acorn Reduced Instruction Set Computer Machine Computer". Grrr. 

That said, I like the other slogan just visible on the nose of the plane. "The World On Time" is short and evocative and sums up what they would like you to think Fedex is about.

Apostrophes

Don't get me started. The worst example I have ever seen was a sign saying this

It's true. But credit to Royal Mail for this slogan:

Taking on the itses is a brave, possibly foolhardy, thing to attempt. Getting it right partly vindicates the decision, although they don't say where it is on its way to, and the capitalisation problem is getting worrying. I wonder what proportion of their staff could spell it correctly.

See http://www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk for more fine apo'strophoric cockup's.