Don’t Let The Spammers Stop You
I wrote in a previous article about subject lines, and how spammers are making it more and more difficult to find one that works.
And now we have Second Life, with which I’m intimately acquainted, as I co-author a site, SecondSeeker.com, that reviews places in Second Life that new (and not-so-new) residents might wish to visit. And as I move about that particular virtual world, I’m struck again and again by the names that people acquire.
I should digress to say that one has a limited choice of both first and surnames in Second Life, unless one wishes to pay a significant amount of money to keep or choose one’s own. Otherwise, it’s pretty much mix-and-match with what’s available, and with millions of residents, fewer and fewer “good” names are available.
The fact is that most of them sound like the friendly bots who bring you your daily serving of spam: Hammond Gillnose, Tarteru Higglebottom, Sally Tennyfeathers, Brice Haiku.
Creative … or confusing?
Remember Lewis Carroll? In The Hunting of the Snark, he writes,
His intimate friends called him “Candle-ends,” And his enemies “Toasted-cheese.”
The Internet has changed the way that we look at a lot of things, and we’d do well to learn its lessons. But let’s not let that keep us from being creative – with subject lines, names, or indeed anything else in which we engage.
And then we’ll all be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in About Writing, The Cutting Edge, Creativity, Words on December 19th, 2007