Dickspeak, pt 1

by Jesse

Hey guys. You know how some nights you’re in the shower, and you’ve already, you know, washed your hair and shaved your face and cried and thrown up dinner and mashed it down the drain with your toes and then you’re bored but you don’t want to get out because it’s cold?? Well here’s my advice: rather than simply stepping out of the shower and saving some water, scan your many products for entertainment! They are goldmines. Marvel at how quickly our English language is degenerating into marketing cant meant to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, meaning! So George Orwell was right after all. Don’t believe me? I guess it’s time for Jesse Reads Products.

TRESemmé conditioner

was funny to read, I thought, but not worth ranting about at great length. Although I did notice that the first ingredient was

Aqua (Water, Eau)

and since eau is just the French word for water, I can only assume that ‘aqua’ is made by combining water … with water. I don’t actually know whether eau is an actual thing in English, but probably not. Probably the creators of the Very Chic and Very French TRESemmé just didn’t want people to read the ingredients and see that the main one is just plain water. But anyway, I then spotted

Nivea for Men

And this one is worth ranting about. It says:

New. Nivea for men. Revitalising face wash. With exfoliating micro particles. With coenzyme Q10. Thoroughly cleans & revitalises tired, stressed skin.

OK, so there are two main selling points here: the “exfoliating micro particles” and the “coenzyme Q10″. Without these, the bottle basically just says

Nivea. Cleans dirty skin.

So let’s begin with the phrase “exfoliating micro particles”. What does that mean? If I was scanning the shelves and I came upon that phrase, I would probably get an image of a scientist in a laboratory, painstakingly picking tiny particles up with a pair of tweezers and dropping them into a lotion. But actually — “exfoliating” just means “cleaning” in this context, and the word “particle” has been redefined by every branch of mathematics and science ever, so that at its most basic it just means “atom” or “a few atoms joined together”, and since atoms are just about the smallest things in the universe, the prefix “micro” doesn’t make any sense. So basically all this phrase is saying is: “Made from atoms that will clean you.” Well I hope so, because everything is made out of atoms, and I did buy this face wash in the hope that it would wash my fucking face. So the bottle manages to generally sound scientific while actually saying nothing at all. See, I wasn’t being pretentious in referencing Orwell. That’s almost the definition of duckspeak.

And come on, creators — nobody knows what Coenzyme Q10 is. You know this as well as we do. So please, either tell us what Coenzyme Q10 is, or don’t mention it. Don’t just say, “Hey, buy this, it is enriched with New Science Thing,” and act all like we’re the stupid one because we haven’t heard of it.

Then we flip over to the other side of the bottle, and this lovely headline says hello:

REVITALISING FACE WASH Q10

That seems fair enou — wait, what? Why is there a Q10 on the end of those words? That doesn’t make any sense. I thought Q10 was an enzyme or something. You literally just inserted Q10 on the end of those words to make it sound more scientific. What the fuck. ‘Q10′ doesn’t mean anything there. It’s just meant to sound good. It’s like if I went to a pub to pick up men, and my pick-up line was, “Hey, my name is Jesse dicks, dicks, many dicks.” It doesn’t mean anything. It just makes you think, “Huh, that sounds quite good. Yeah. I want that on my face.”

SKIN COMPATIBILITY DERMATOLOGICALLY APPROVED

Approved? What? By whom? BY WHOOOOM? By your fucking mother? Was she like, “Yes, it’s lovely, dear,” because you approached her with Nivea for Men in your hand, like a cat with the corpse of a mouse hanging from its jaw, and she was watching her stories, and she wanted to get rid of you? Don’t let the word dermatologically fool you. It sure doesn’t mean anything here. All the word means is, “Related to the skin,” so as long as somebody approves of it then of course it’s dermatologically approved. It couldn’t be un-dermatologically approved! It’s like saying that the cinematography of a film was cinematographically bad, or that the music was musically good!

And anyway, what’s “skin compatibility”? Doesn’t that just mean that it won’t fuck your skin up? Because that seems to me like a fairly modest claim. “Nivea for Men is literally compatible with the skin of a human being. If you put this on your skin, your skin will, at the very least, not turn a nasty shade of purple and burn as though you had just stuck your face into a pile of hot coals.”

And that is why my mother knocked on the door of the bathroom and asked me why I was shouting expletives in the shower.

There are some other language-related things I’d like to rant about, but I’ll save them for another day.

For now, I’ll link you to the blog of my most excellent friend Nick, who talks about music frequently. Nick knows more about music than anyone I know (except for maybe Joe). Once, I told him that I was “really getting into” David Bowie recently. He said, “Meh, I’m not a huge fan. What album do you like?” And I said, “The ‘best of’ album?” And he said, “Which one?” And I said, “The one with his face on it and it’s kind of blue?” And he said, “I like the first few songs on that.” This coming from somebody who isn’t a huge fan of David Bowie. On his blog, he recommends and links to great songs and artists, which is good for me, because for most of my life I have just copied my sister in all of her music listening habits, and she left this house quite a while ago so I’ve just been sitting here with those old albums of Good Charlotte and Delta Goodrem on repeat. So go check it out!

Bye guys. Enjoy English tomorrow/today/yesterday.