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Friday, June 30, 2017

I see what you did there

Yesterday I saw an advertisement that included this line:

"Become a Mentor Today!"

Today I got a "let's not have another preterm baby, mmmmkay?" packet in the mail and the header for their newsletter is this:

"Learning Moments"

Emphasis, in both cases, is original to the content.

As an amateur graphic designer and linguist with the utmost appreciation of a good pun, I'm begging you:

Stop!

(As in I want you to stop, get it? Haha. (Not funny, I know.))


Both lines are almost funny but both fall flat on their faces. The first because one doesn't become "a men" by signing up to be a mentor. One could become a man, but not a men. Nope.

The second appears alright but it doesn't sound clever because we don't say mom-ents. We say mo-ments. Big difference. And you could try to still read it simply as "moments" but the "mom" part is so bold and the rest of the phrase so understated that it's...difficult.

You can't just take part of a word and use it like that. It's not clever (that's ever clever, in case you didn't get it).

I don't think it would have bothered me so much if I had encountered one or the other, but I encountered them both within a 24-hour period. It's also possible that this wouldn't have bothered me if I hadn't been spending every evening picking apart Andrew's dissertation. My word-snob sensors are all running full force (though admittedly there are likely several mistakes in my own writing since, well, I don't proofread this stuff) so I'm going to try to cool my jets and stop picking apart my junk mail now.

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