Oh the difference a preposition makes.

Yeah, I’m a geek. I get a thrill from grammatically-sweet sentence constructions. Go ahead and point and laugh, but there’s a place in this world for people that enjoy using language well. There’s a lot of money to be made by those whose communication talent rises above TXT messaging. Madison Avenue comes to mind. I’ve noticed that a lot of people tend to look down on ad writing, defining it as somewhat less pure than, say, their shitty poetry, but I don’t know of a single person that makes a living solely off of their poetry. They’re always teachers or counselors or something in addition. Never just a poet. There are a lot more people paying their bills solely by writing ads than odes.

Whether you’re writing a poem lovely as a tree, or pimping calling plans in a Sunday circular, the goal of any writer is to get read. So we all sweat over our dog-eared thesauri, beating back the blank pages one word at a time – trying to find the perfect resonance with our imagined audience. When we do manage to craft something worthwhile, we acknowledge it as the fragile, transitory thing that it is, for it will soon be lost in the pressure to create the new, the next, the now.

Fortunately, it looks like this blogging thing will be around a while, so we can at least keep a record of our fleeting victories, adding a small trumpet blast to the cacophony. It doesn’t matter if we’re the only ones to hear it.

I was cleaning up a press release for one of our divisions today, and cogitated long upon this sentence:

“We are achieving rapid growth to support multi-axis and one-hit machining on latest generation mill-turn machines.”

I didn’t like it. It was awkward and unclear. Were we expecting to be able to support these machines once we hit a certain growth target, or were we growing in our ability to support them? Either way, it sounded weak. Like we were playing catch-up with a certain segment of the industry.

I stood, hand on chin, chewing on my pipe stem and frowning in a wizened manner. I pondered. I weighed and discarded options. The stillness of my countenance belied the centuries of etymological pressure I brought to bear on the problem. With great care I reached out and made a tiny change. But as a master Go player can upset an opponent’s carefully-built strategy with the turn of one stone, so did I transform the entire conceptualization of the piece.

“We are achieving rapid growth by supporting multi-axis and one-hit machining on latest generation mill-turn machines.”

No longer were we thrashing about in the backfield of technological development, trying desperately to keep pace. Now, our explosive growth was instead fueled by that same advancement. The fact that we could and did support the latest machines was the reason people flocked to our banner. It implied that our competitors couldn’t offer the same service, and promised the customer that they could expand all they wanted without fear of being stuck with obsolete technology.

One different word. One world of difference.

Toot.