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What Did I Just Read?
Old habits die hard. I still get up every morning and read the television trade papers. A story that caught my eye this morning was Hallmark letting go of one of their executives and consolidating her position with another person’s. In this day and age of tight media budgets, there’s certainly nothing unusual about that. What did catch my eye was this quote from the company’s press release:
Hallmark is aligning its consumer-facing touch points, including content, under a single leader… with a focus and expertise in the expression of the Hallmark brand to consumers — from product to experiences and now content, across multiple platforms.
What does that even mean? Is it actually in English? “Consumer-facing touch points?” Is that better than a consumer-facing field goal?
Published in General
If you speak clearly, you can be held accountable.
There was a casting change during the writing of the synopsis and the new guy looked more like a Bob than a Trevor. We only have 3 weeks to crank out this turkey so time is money.
Some of that reminds me of the old George Carlin routine regarding how we went from “shell-shocked” in WWI to “Post-traumatic stress disorder” after Vietnam. Or the use of phrases such as “at this point in time”, or even worse “at this particular point in time”. That last one really nailed it down. Carlin asked, “What is wrong with ‘now'”?
When I started at a defense company in 1985, I came across a bit of satire entitled “How to Write Technical”. Even better in its own way than Carlin’s routine.
Sounds like the “Bastard Operator From Hell” stuff.
My father had consulting contracts with some state and local police forces. He repeated a story by a retired Captain about how hard it was the 1970s to get cops to be more careful and less conclusory in their public statements. Mostly, they just started sticking the word “alleged” in every sentence. It got the point where a department spokesman started referring to murder victims as “the alleged deceased” and had to be corrected by higher ups. Language policies can be difficult to implement.
The women on NPR’s “1A” referred to the “alleged assassination attempt”.
Well, it could have been an AI-orchestrated hoax to benefit Trump. Or an Israeli plot to take over the world. Or a CIA plot by the same guys who killed Kennedy. Or part of an elaborate epic movie production. You never know…….
Same department, but different guys.
While at a restaurant last night my wife cashed in her winnings on Kino. I seen this slip and it reminded me of this post. So naturally I put it under someone’s windshield wiper on the way to the car…