Thinking Through It...

There's a billboard on the Audrey Jeffers Highway/Foreshore Freeway with a banner headline that screams 'SCREW IT' in large capital letters that can be seen from far away, and it is only when one gets close enough is it possible to see the smaller secondary headline that includes the words 'sand it,' 'nail it' and a couple of other qualifiers that 'corrects' the mind and conveys the thought that the billboard is selling some sort of hard-ware and is not really pornographic or obscene.

Or is it?

The writer/conceptualizer who came up with the play on words knows fully well the intention was to get away with the obscenity, trusting shock value to grab attention and possibly even garner negative publicity to help build awareness through attention, and even though I am inadvertently assisting in that regard, I am doing so to make a point, that human beings think in images. We may use words to convey an idea one to the other, but it is the job of our brains to take those words and translate them instantly into picture images or 'thoughts' that we can understand, and that is how communication works. Had mister billboard's words SCREW IT been accompanied by an equally visible picture of a screw driver our minds would have made the connection but that was not his intention.

If I were to tell you that I just saw a man break the traffic light on the corner of Long Circular Road, it is highly likely that even if you weren't familiar with Long Circular Road you would still picture a driver in a car failing to stop at a red light, not so? But this is where it gets tricky. How are you to know what kind of man (height, skin color, age, what type of hair etc) I saw break the light? It doesn't matter because we think in images, and if I did not say I saw an old chinese gentleman with rasta hair in a pink Audi break the traffic light your mind would fill in the blanks and offer up your 'standard' image of 'man who would most likely break traffic light' and your standard image of type of car that would most likely be involved in such an event. This is another cognitive tool referred to in law enforcement as 'profiling,' but as that is not the point of this discussion it is only mentioned in passing.

What if the man in my story, my old chinese rasta was not driving? What if my words failed to convey the real idea that I was trying to share, that what I saw was an old chinese rasta gentleman climb up the traffic light on the corner of Long Circular Road and hit it with a hammer and break it?

See how easy it is for language to fail us in communication? That is referred to as 'lost in translation' and basically refers to a simple idea's failure to effectively communicate. Is your brain hurting now? Mine too so don't be alarmed. The point of all of this is that we are easily deceived, misled and bamboozled by words, and it is our job to police our minds and remain aware at all times.

Here's another one. A little while back a small apparel company in the UK named French Connection found itself an unexpected beneficiary of this trick of the mind. The story goes that a fax was sent from the head office in the United Kingdom (UK) to their subsidiary office in New York (NY) and the memo header read “from French Connection United Kingdom to French Connection New York,” only it was written in the shorthand abbreviation “From FCUK to FCNY,” and the intern on the other end receiving the fax, made a joke about what the abbreviated name for French Connection United Kingdom 'almost' spelt. This resulted in the creation of a marketing phenomenon, an overnight sensation and a world brand on the misspelling of a word that could almost be an obscene expletive, but one that was now legal and even morally acceptable to wear emblazoned across one's chest.

We speak words but think thoughts, and even though FCUK stands for French Connection United Kingdom, it is not the first thing we think when we read it, and neither is the billboard. The fact that we get away with the relaxing of morals says a lot about global immaturity at the leadership level, but that is something we will have to address at another time. Until then, screw it.

Or nail it. Or sand it.