I received a fairly terse reply to an email today, which took me a little by surprise. I thought I’d been polite, courteous and to the point; the reply suggested I had somehow upset the recipient’s feelings.
It wasn’t until I re-read my original message that his source of irritation became apparent: it had been autocorrected so that instead of referring to him as a “well-known specialist” I had referred to him as a “well-known socialist”.
The scope for auto-correction-inflicted misunderstandings is widely acknowledged and well documented. Entire websites exist to convey the joys of an incorrect word dropped into an otherwise innocuous sentence.
What is less well documented, for obvious reasons, is the regular misunderstanding caused by the difficulties of conveying nuance, subtlety and tone in short, written communications.
Irony is an absolute minefield, and sarcasm is to be avoided. Best to stick to literal definitions and avoid trying to hint at meaning. Say what you mean, and mean what you say. Had I stuck to these rules I could have avoided a protracted and ultimately pointless argument about the dress Charlize Theron wore to the Oscars. Let me set the record straight by saying it is my opinion that the dress was red, OK?
It’s less forgivable for tone and nuance to be lost in longer forms of communication like, for example, television advertisements. Having said that, however, entire movies have been misunderstood when the viewer failed to detect an essential subtext.
But advertising exists only to convey precise messages, like: here’s this thing, buy it.
However, unless I have myself just completely missed the point, someone at an advertising agency thinks (and I guess the client agrees) that it is appropriate to represent a male retiree as a bit of a dick.
At least, that’s how the main character in a current TV ad comes across, marching pompously out of his office on the day of his retirement, to the strains of Thunderstruck by AC/DC, with palpable disdain for his now-former colleagues.
Watching the ad, I imagine they’re unanimously delighted to see him out of there. We’ve all worked with someone like him, at some point in our lives, so to that extent he is a faithful stereotype, and congratulations are due for representing him so accurately. He’s just a curious choice to promote the joys of retirement, and an odd character to create for your customers to empathise with.
Maybe it’s just me – I’m hardly the advertiser’s target demographic, after all – but I half wished that after executing a ridiculous high kick to activate the automatic door to his building and striding confidently into the car park, he’d been run over by a speeding retirement-home bus.
There would be little ambiguity in the tone and subtext of that message.
