Over the last couple of months, there’s been one radio ad in particular which has stood out for me.  Not for its merit, or even lack of merit, but for one of the gags in it. The ad, for mobile…

It’s official. I’m never going to be a guest on the BBC’s Room 101. Clearly, I was never going to meet the key requirement for making it on to the show (i.e. being famous). But I only discovered recently that…

Some words and phrases we didn’t know at the start of the year: Covid-19. Covidiot. R number. Super-spreader. Flattening the curve. Of course, you’d expect something as big as a global pandemic to have an effect on language as well…

My wife had the idea a while ago. ‘You ought to start an agency that does advertising the way it used to,’ she said.  ‘Well-written press ads, clever posters, TV ads that are better than the programmes.’ ‘You could call…

I’ve mentioned in a previous post (18 October 2016) the brand endline which I consider to be the worst ever. To save you searching through the blog archive to find it, it’s this one for Stella Artois:  The fact that…

There’s a book to be written about the language surrounding the whole Brexit business. (Actually one has already been written, though it was published a year ago and doubtless needs a substantial update by now.) You could make a strong case that…

Coming up with a good name is never easy, as demonstrated on The Apprentice every year when the candidates call their teams things like Thrust, Spurt and Tumescence.  (OK, they haven’t used these names yet, but you know what I mean.) And to…

Happy New Year!  Here we are in January again. Or ‘Veganuary’, if you’re going along with the campaign to take up a meat-free diet this month.  Or ‘Januhairy’, if you’re a woman who’s decided not to shave any body hair. …

‘Ugh, he’s such a try-hard…’ Our son said this about one of his classmates the other day.  I’d not come across this particular put-down before, but it wasn’t hard to guess that he was criticising the other boy for being…

The misspelling of road markings is one of those stories which appears in the news every so often – this blog highlighted examples in 2011 and 2014 – but there was a particularly good one which came to light this week.  What made this…