Inno-Ma-Vation
I detest contemporary use of the words "innovation" and its mutant offspring "to innovate." Once again business-morons have ruined a perfectly serviceable word by turning it into a buzzword, a word that "everybody knows" the meaning of but yet manages to have no meaning at all because it no longer maps onto anything in the real world. Case in point:
I bought my third MagLite Solitaire – a single AAA cell flashlight with an inexplicably bright bulb – today (the first two being passengers in the purses snatched from me nearly 11 and 23 months ago. I'd better have this one for a lot longer than a month). While wondering whether to keep the instructions I noticed that the back page touts an "[i]nnovative extended key lead allows the light beam and keys to be used together in the same direction." What this means is that the flashlight comes with a little string about as long as the flashlight itself, which is to say about 3", with a 1/2" key ring at each end. (Unless all you have is one house key and one car key, the ring is basically entirely inadequate.) Anyway, you need two hands to operate it, if only to turn it on (done by twisting the cap), so there's really no necessity to have it attached to the keys in the first place.
In any event, a longer string is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "innovative." It's string. It's not even string, it's the quantity of string. It's a longer short piece of string. That's it. There's nothing special about the string itself. There is nothing, nothing whatsoever, innovative about a slightly longer piece of string. The claim is silly, purchasers recognize it's silly, and the bastard marketers know it's silly and they know that we know it, and yet they continue to say it because...because that's just the way that marketers write copy. Meanings don't matter, words do; they use words because it's a business style, a business aesthetic. That's how they strip them of meaning, and once stripped of meaning all that's left is form, a hollow, empty shell of a word that yet signifies in spite of its lack of signification. If you're a corporate drone, you're part of the pus in the boils on society's body. (Not that the pus comprises only corporate drones.)
I bought my third MagLite Solitaire – a single AAA cell flashlight with an inexplicably bright bulb – today (the first two being passengers in the purses snatched from me nearly 11 and 23 months ago. I'd better have this one for a lot longer than a month). While wondering whether to keep the instructions I noticed that the back page touts an "[i]nnovative extended key lead allows the light beam and keys to be used together in the same direction." What this means is that the flashlight comes with a little string about as long as the flashlight itself, which is to say about 3", with a 1/2" key ring at each end. (Unless all you have is one house key and one car key, the ring is basically entirely inadequate.) Anyway, you need two hands to operate it, if only to turn it on (done by twisting the cap), so there's really no necessity to have it attached to the keys in the first place.
In any event, a longer string is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "innovative." It's string. It's not even string, it's the quantity of string. It's a longer short piece of string. That's it. There's nothing special about the string itself. There is nothing, nothing whatsoever, innovative about a slightly longer piece of string. The claim is silly, purchasers recognize it's silly, and the bastard marketers know it's silly and they know that we know it, and yet they continue to say it because...because that's just the way that marketers write copy. Meanings don't matter, words do; they use words because it's a business style, a business aesthetic. That's how they strip them of meaning, and once stripped of meaning all that's left is form, a hollow, empty shell of a word that yet signifies in spite of its lack of signification. If you're a corporate drone, you're part of the pus in the boils on society's body. (Not that the pus comprises only corporate drones.)
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 21:05
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