NORTHERN PLANNER

So I finally got around to reading Stephen Pinker’s the stuff of thought. Which is every bit as interesting as I’d hoped. Far too much to recount here, you’ll just have to read it, but there was one bit that struck me about wordplay and proposition writing.

There’s a little bit that talks about polysemy and its role in humour. Polysemy is where a word had more than one meaning, which you can deduce from its context within other words and sentence construction. Like red has a variety of meanings – red-hot, red-hair, red-alert for example. Red hair is ginger, red-hot is a particular expression of heat that is very hot, but not as searing as white hot (thought red hot coals are orange).

These words are brilliant for wordplay and dry humour -like Mae West’s, " Marriage is an institution, but I’m not ready for an institution yet". Flipping the meaning of ‘institution’ get the effect.

Or WC Field’s answer to, " It must be hard to lose a relative". The answer was, "Nearly impossible". Changing the meaning of ‘lose’.

So what’s my point? Well, I get nervous of propositions in briefs that try to be headlines. But you do need to make them interesting. They need a hook, some tension. I think that this kind of polysemous wordplay is a great trick to make them sing out without falling into the trap of writing a headline.

I’ve often got out of being stuck by using liberating not for example. This usually works by looking at what great about something, and dramatising what it ISN’T rather than what it is. So Lynx is NOT dirty. This works through the more than one meaning of ‘dirty’.

Then there’s the trick of forcing a word into sentence it shouldn’t really live in, using metaphor. It forces the reader to give it more attention than it should normally warrant, paints a picture in the mind. Make information emotional, not just fact. Like Tom Lebvers’ " Soon we’ll be sliding down the razorblade of life". Which makes ‘life is hard’ more graphic, you can almost feel it…which brings me to maybe my favourite proposition – polaroid is not a camera, it’s social lubrication (by the way they get to this by giving wedding guests free cameras and seeing what they did them…doubt it would have come from groups!). It allows you some traction, friction or whatever metaphor you like, in a sentence.

I’ll be looking for polysemy and metaphor in my propositions. I think it’s a good way of finding hooks, unless you’re one of those natural proposition writers. If so, count your blessings.