This is no time to be coy

Good sailing shoes are waterproof. Which usually means, they don’t ventilate well. Smelly shoes are often a notable facet of life aboard small boats.

My own shoes got a degree too lived-in on a recent passage from Liverpool to Southampton. The rest of the crew were pretty kind about it. But I know that’s what they were doing, so I resolved to prevent the problem happening again.

I bought a bottle of shoe deodorant.  This is what it says on the label:

Clarks Odour Killer Spray with its unique odour-eliminating formula disrupts the metabolic process of unwanted odour-causing micro-organisms and thus interrupts their ability to function, grow and reproduce.

Run that by me again? Ignore the 27-word, one-sentence length of the paragraph. Even the first and only comma, three words from end, has a begrudging feel about it..

But my point is this: what we read isn’t selling copy. It’s a lazy parroting of the manufacturers’ brief to the packaging designers. It’s a rambling explanation of how the stuff works. It doesn’t make me feel any better for buying it.

Surely, if we disrupt the metabolic process of anything to the point where it can’t function, grow and reproduce (which is a bit like saying ‘Hello, good evening and welcome’), we pretty much kill the beggar. That, I’m sure, is how your average smelly-trainer-wearing jock would prefer to articulate it. And why do we specify that it works on unwanted odour-causing micro-organisms? Aren’t they all unwanted? Does it spare the wanted ones?

What’s wrong with telling it like it is? Odour Killer Spray kills the bugs that make shoes smelly. One squirt, and your shoes are fresh again!

I know what’s wrong with it. It means hiring a writer. But nowadays, the ability to touch-text is more highly regarded than the ability to spell, or parse a sentence. No need to pay someone to do what I can do myself, they say.

The label also features two simple drawings. One of a hand, squirting the stuff from the bottle into a shoe. In case you don’t know how to squirt deodorant into a shoe. And a picture of a shoe drying. Little lines throb and radiate from the entire shoe. Those little lines make it look just like the stinky shoe it was in the first place …

I guess they didn’t want to hire an art director, either.