With thanks to plucky reader Maureen Stewart, the inspiration for this week's rant comes from that very special genre of writing called real estate advertising.
"Does anyone proof-read anymore?" Maureen asks, citing a house that is apparently "spilt" level. "Haven't they activated the spellcheck?" she adds after finding a house with loads of "diffrant" features?
Maureen is my new soul sister. Nothing irritates me more than advertisements thrown together like word gumbo - murky casseroles of typos and mixed metaphors floating in a broth of bad punctuation and grammatical goo.
"Four stories of fun!" one brochure recently screamed, causing me to wonder if it was indeed a house for sale or a rip-roaring anthology.
"Your new lifestyle is just a hop, trip and jump away!" Um, ouch?
Spelling errors noted this week: decieving, trannsfered, remaning, seeside, cortyard and my personal favourite, immaculent.
Highly commended honours go to the "state of the arc kitchen".
In fairness, real estate agents are busy people and only too aware that in the digital media age, a good picture is worth a thousand butchered words.
Until it's definitively proven that good writing can add a single dollar to any buyer's offer, most real estate ads will continue to look as though they were written at gunpoint.
There are of course exceptions - agents who are clearly little more than frustrated poets trapped in sensible clothes.
I delight in their colourful prose ("Hear the rhythmic music of the waves thrumming from beyond the sand dunes"), even when it doesn't quite work.
"Morning sunshine fills the dining room for breakfast and in the evenings ..." Really? The evenings too?
"Feed the wallabies as they hop by in your beautiful gardens ..." Somehow I don't think the gardens will be beautiful for very long.
"Clever open-plan living will keep a watchful eye on everyone ..." Cancel the babysitter!
"Hold your breath as you enter the home through the entrance." Through the entrance, you say? Kooky!
Hopeful literature aside, there has been a refreshing movement by the industry away from false promises and ambiguity towards more matter-of-fact honesty within real estate advertising.
Ten years ago every home was "simply one of a kind".
This week I noticed a "very rough diamond", a "plain Jane with a nice personality" and, somewhat confusingly, a townhouse that is "fairly unique". Fairly?
But what I hope may never change is real estate advertising's very special relationship with the concepts of space and light.
Apparently light still creates space, space welcomes light, light and space co-exist in perfect harmony and often they create beautiful babies called ambience, atmosphere and, I kid you not, "alluminessence".
And anyway, there will always be a more dubious genre of writing, as United States critic Donal Henahan once noted: "Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists".
Columnists aren't much better.
carrieon@bigpond.com
Carrie Cox is a journalist, author and mother who one day hopes to finish a cup of coffee while it's still hot.
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