Branding abuse

When you give something a name, you don't necessarily get to decide what people are going to call it. It's more a case of proposing a name, which the public can then accept, reject or subvert.

Recently Newcastle United's hallowed ground St James' Park was renamed Sportsdirect.com@ St James' Park. There are plenty of better places on the internet you can go for a breakdown of the staggering wrongness of this, but from my point of view as a part-geordie who is all but oblivious to football, the main point is that nobody is going to call it that. At least not without plenty of irony, before launching into an expletive-filled rant at Mike Ashley. Even if it was "officially" called Sportsdirect.com@St James' Park for a million years, geordies would still not be heard saying to each other in the pub: "Ah cannut wait to see the toon thrash Man U at Sports Direct Dot Com At Saint James' Park on Saturday."

Nowadays (largely thanks to the interweb) this sort of branding abuse extends to punctuation, with so many firms deciding they'll look cooler if they throw in some lower-case letters in odd places, or a colon in the middle or some other nonsense. AOL just became "Aol." Why?? Are we supposed to start saying "Ay, lower-case oh, lower-case el, full stop"?

Sometimes companies that have given themselves tossy names see sense and put them right again, waking up one morning and realising that they've been off their faces on the noxious fumes emitted by branding consultants. Perhaps most famously in recent years, Royal Mail briefly became Consignia, but when the entire nation simultaneously cringed, it went back to Royal Mail. Check out the diagram at the top of this article for an example of the sort of toss that led them to imagine Consignia was a good idea.

Abbreviations offer some even weirder examples of branding abuse. Did you know that the British Medical Journal is no longer called the British Medical Journal? Officially it's just 'BMJ'. Of course, that still means 'British Medical Journal' and it remains a medical journal from a place called Britain, and the press still refer to it as the British Medical Journal because that's what it is, but officially it's BMJ.

Similarly, the advertiser body ISBA used to be the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin sort of a name. But you won't find any reference to the full name in any of its materials these days. If you ask what ISBA actually is then they'll tell you it's "The Voice of British Advertisers". Fair enough, but you don't have to be unusually inquisitive to wonder what it stands for, do you? I'm guessing that the reasoning behind this was that "The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers" sounded way too stodgy and old-fashioned. ISBA does, after all, exist in the flashy world of advertising, where branding is everything.

Still, I hold out hope that, as every other organisation you come across gets itself a tossy name, we'll eventually see the pendulum swing back, so that we again start to see bodies called things like the North British Locomotive Company (no doubt about what they do) and The Artisans', Labourers' and General Dwellings Company.

There's no alternative

Dominic Lawson has some interesting points to make about offensive comedy, which I was writing about a couple of weeks back, in this Independent article.

But my favourite bit is his aside about alternative medicine: “Either medicine works, having passed the usual tests, or it doesn’t. If ‘alternative medicine’ works then it isn't alternative; and if it doesn't work then it isn't medicine.”

Too true. Definitions like ‘alternative medicine’ crop up when people either aren’t sure what they mean or can’t bring themselves to say it. Music is fertile ground for this – from a distance it always appears to be organised in obvious genres, but when you actually try to categorise it everything gets a bit jumbled, and we end up with terms like ‘world music’ (as opposed to music that’s not from the world?) and ‘urban music’, which implies that anything made by skinny white boys with guitars must be ‘rural’. Here and there we get coy attempts to be a bit more precise like the ‘Music of Black Origin’ (MOBO) Awards, which means that Justin Timberlake is allowed in. Come to think of it, Michael Jackson was of black origin, but after about 1990, not really black anymore. Perhaps they were thinking of him.

Thinking much too hard about a lower case 'h'

I received a text message today from the National Blood Service. It reads as follows:

hi, really hope you can give blood again… see our mailing or visit our website for details… thanks for your support!

I'm guessing the nice people at the NBS wanted me to respond by thinking, "I'd better go and give blood again sharpish!" But, being a loser, I actually thought, "Why have they used a lower case 'h' and a '…' instead of full stop?" I don't think it was an accident - I think someone in the NBS's communications department has made a decision that I would be more likely to forfeit my lunch break to have blood siphoned out of my arm if they talked to me in lower case with questionable punctuation.

Fuddy duddies and curmudgeons will see this as yet more evidence of dumbing down, and the impending death of the art of writing. But this rather heartening post which I stumbled across last week offers another view, citing a study from Stanford University to claim that the youth of today exchange more written communication than any previous generation. Professor Andrea Lunsford reckons we're “in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilisation”. Wow. That's good to hear because it annoys me when people say that civilisation is doomed just because kids are saying omg wtf ttyl lol.

But then, like a lot of people, I'm a massive hypocrite on this one. I laugh at my girlfriend for getting annoyed when her friends don't punctuate their text messages properly, but secretly I feel pretty much the same way. The really important thing about spelling, punctuation and grammar is that, as well as making your meaning clear, they send out a message between the lines. If you confuse an onion with a union, that might ruin your bolognese/employment tribunal hearing - but it's not actually very often that mistakes like that obscure what you're trying to say. It's just that they give the wrong impression - that you're not very bright, that you're careless, that you don't respect the person you're talking to, that you're being too casual...

Some of this, of course, is just snobbery. There are a lot of people who take a lot of pleasure in pointing out the mistakes of others and making all sorts of assumptions about them. Some of these self-appointed defenders of the English language seem to believe that the only reason anyone could be less well (or more cheaply) educated than themselves is idleness. But that's just life - language is one of the tools we use to judge each other. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes it's not, but there are plenty of much more superficial things than spelling (skin colour, accent, haircut) which we use to judge each other all the time.

Personally I find the smug bastards who make a fuss about prepositions at ends of sentences and apostrophes in the wrong places to be much more annoying than the people who make these mistakes. But that's a judgement like any other, I suppose. On the whole I still think it's worth getting things right, in order to send out the signal that you give a shit about the reader, and that you've put some effort in, and that you're not an idiot. But it really depends on whether it's your mum or your parole officer who's going to read it.

The NBS have obviously decided that they want to be casual with me. They want to be my friend. They want me to know that they're down with the kids. Either that or they just can't write (which I refuse to believe, since they can transfuse blood, and that has to be harder). They're probably terribly chuffed that they've managed to contact me by such a cutting edge medium at all, and are keen to show that they know the vernacular. As a result (once I've finished obsessing about the lower case 'h'), perhaps I'll feel slightly more inclined to go and have them stab me in the arm again soon. Or perhaps I'll feel like they're patronising me and choose to keep my blood. Either way, they've used language that some would consider 'wrong' to tell me something about how they want to relate to me. These nuances get lost if you apply the rules too strictly.

The offence epidemic

Never mind swine flu, it seems to me that the major public health threat of the day is an epidemic of taking – or claiming to take – 'offence' at things we see and hear in the media. Mass offence has been triggered in recent months by the writings, utterances and actions of Russell Brand, Carol Thatcher, Jan Moir, Anton du Beke, Jimmy Carr, AA Gill and many more.

But what does it really mean when people claim to be offended by a TV programme, a newspaper article, or (in the cases of du Beke, Thatcher and others) a personal comment to which they weren't privy?

The first thing to understand is that a lot of people love taking offence. There are people who want to be offended and want to be seen to be offended. They want to stand proudly on the moral high ground breathing in the air. Charlie Brooker offers a lovely portrait of these people here. They tend to read the Daily Mail - but not always – sometimes the Mail is the object of their outrage.

Tim Black of Spiked called the recent explosion of offence taking over Jan Moir's Mail article on the death of Steven Gately "a spectacle of feelings, a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence, a carnival of first person pronouns and expressions of hurt and proxy offence".

The next thing to understand is that, as Black highlights with the term 'proxy offence', much of the supposed offence claimed is on behalf of others, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. The language of offence hints at this: things can be described as 'offensive' even when no-one has said that they themselves were 'offended' by them. We're all walking on eggshells trying not to hurt the feelings of a super-sensitive someone who may or may not exist.

Then there's the media's role. They fan the flames, of course, but often they get the fire going in the first place as well. Take the case of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross's treatment of Andrew Sachs on Radio 2 last year. I agree that their behaviour was wrong, I'm not surprised Sachs was upset, and he deserved the apology he got. But of the 38,000 people who complained to the BBC, how many could honestly say they themselves were 'offended' by the broadcast? In the week after the show was broadcast to 400,000 people, the total number of complaints received was two. It was only after the Mail on Sunday reported the prank that a further 37,998 people decided they too had been offended.

If people haven't been paying sufficient attention to be offended first time around, journalists are more than happy to reproduce the offending material to give them another chance. The papers feign outrage and position themselves as the defenders of morality, but their real role is often to deliver the outrageous material to us, and then loudly denounce it. They are at once the offender and the offended. This dual role seems to come naturally to the Mail, but was turned back on it recently by Twitterers who forwarded the link to Jan Moir's homophobic piece on Steven Gately - simultaneously distributing the article and calling for it to be removed. That's just daft.

Comedian Jimmy Carr also felt the wrath of Twitter-fuelled offence-by-proxy when he told a joke about injured servicemen. Anyone who's familiar with Jimmy Carr won't be surprised by this - he tiptoes the boundaries of taste, and is very popular for it. The joke in question wasn't noticeably more distasteful than other things he and his peers have said. Some of the reports say the gag met with stunned silence. Others say people laughed. Almost all of them reprint the joke in full. Very soon the stupid snowball of proxy offence got rolling, the joke was repeated more than Carr could ever have hoped or feared, and now all sorts of important people who weren't there have claimed they were offended by it. Carr tried in vain to point out that he has demonstrated support for injured servicemen in the past, and to argue that maybe an edgy joke highlighting the horror of war might not be such a bad thing. But eventually he apologised and dropped the joke from his routine. I don't blame him for doing so, but I do think it's a shame.

Another example came when Strictly Come Dancing star Anton du Beke called co-contestant Laila Rouass a 'Paki' in an off air exchange that (are you seeing the pattern yet?) was later picked up by the press. Rouass was offended, and I don't blame her. But was I offended? Are you joking? I wasn't there. Frankly it's a matter for Rouass and du Beke, who, let's not forget, are both grown-ups. None of this stopped thousands of people claiming 'offence' - once the News of the World told them about it.

Everyone has the right to take offence from time to time, but we also have the right to give it. Anything might cause offence, and if we went through life trying to second guess other people's feelings all the time, we'd be much poorer for it.

All this matters because 'offence', sometimes first-hand, sometimes second-hand, is becoming such a powerful force in society. It fills newspaper pages, fills heads, fills afternoons, derails careers, shatters reputations, distorts public discourse, forces insincere apologies from people who shouldn't have to give them, and stifles public expression by indulging a childish view that we have a right not to hear things we don't like. The offended people get on their high horses, make a terrible racket, define the media coverage and shape the debate. And often they end up getting appeased: Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, Jimmy Carr and Anton du Beke all apologised, Carol Thatcher got sacked, and in the case of Jan Moir, the PCC was so overwhelmed with emails that it had to break with its usual policy of only dealing with complaints from people 'directly affected' by an article. This is all very bad for our democracy, in which we're supposed to be able to say what we want, and not worry too much if people don't like it.

So I'm afraid it comes down to this: If you're easily offended, you can kiss my hairy bumcrack.