Because my email address is out there in the public domain (and whose hasn’t been pawned, let’s be honest. I used to think junk postal mail was annoying. Happy days, on reflection) I get plenty of spam. It all goes straight to the bin but sometimes things catch my eye.
Usually the sender’s unplanned success is due to some delightfully misplaced turn of phrase (or as the semi-famous book had it, ‘English As She Is Spoke’ - one Pedro Carolino’s 19th-century Portuguese–English conversational guide, if you’ve not come across it) and while there’s nothing so easy as a pot-shot at poor grammar from a non-native-speaker, something about ‘Morris’ (as that was the senders name) offer was particularly delightful.
Morris, you see, was keen to help me with SEO strategy for my website - flattering, but entirely wasted on my online efforts. And yet, as the law of unintended consequences would have us believe, here was a gift of much more interesting ‘wrong-just-right’ strategy (which older readers might recall was, I think, coined by there late Tibor Kalman.)
That awkward slip, while easily dismissed as a terrible auto-correct error opens up interesting new avenues. What if the direction of my language was slightly off-kilter? Not quite accurate? A bit wonky?
Slightly imperfect sounds like a terrible admission of failure. Everyone wants the exceptional eye for detail. 100% no errors.
Sure, that’s fine. But where’s the ‘humanity’ in that? Personality is implicitly ‘in error’. Not ‘perfect’ but much, much more interesting.
Given our determined AI lean towards getting ideas generated, slightly-not-right is the thing actual people do best and where all the really interesting, creative stuff happens that catches our attention. See that? Human error. Made me laugh.
Perhaps we should keep that from the machines. Ah, except that they already read this.
Post Script:
Slips, trips, breaks and falls
Sounds like an early ’70’s proto-prog rock band, or maybe a riff on Lynne Truss’s excoriation of punctuation mistakes. In fact, this little tribute is to the emergency services, because I was ‘volunteered’ by work to do the three-day first aid course - so am now with black-belt levels of bandage tying (and bandanas) and Willing (if not perhaps able) to tackle anything from an earthquake in Oxfordshire to a arms broken by swans.
Sometimes there are learning-based things that are at such a tangent to the day job as to be pretty much on ignore. But even studio denizens suffer that same as other mortals. And anything you can learn that’ll maybe help others, that’s got to be a good thing.
Anyway, have a think about getting yourself on a first aider course. Nice to know you’ll be part of the rescue team, even if you don’t get the blue lights and traffic queue jumping.
