December 25, 2006
Etcetera
My sister gave me a “Wind Spinner” — a garden ornament made of a long spiral of heavy wire and a glass ball. It was made in China. The only instruction that came with it is this fortune cookie-sized slip of paper, taped to the wire inside a tiny zip-lock bag:
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this is the best christmas ever.
Excellent! You win!
Did your sister give you the Wind Spinner because it included this magnificent sample of copywriting, or was it a bonus?
Hi India — hope you are having a lovely holiday. The slip of paper was a bonus! Two gifts in one. I plan to stuff it into a little birdhouse where I keep all similarly sized bits of found text. My daughter started the habit long ago; we discovered after the fact that for several years she had been putting all of her fortune cookie fortunes in it. Fortunately we never put the house outside for actual birds to use, although some small wren might have found a wordy heaven if we had.
Actually, it makes more sense than most of the instructions on Chinese made goods. Are you the “someone” who will rephrase?
Merry Christmas…
Reminds me of the inscrutable wisdom I turn up every time I throw the I Ching.
Winston: You are right — this is not so strange as some I have seen, and the identity of the “someone” is, for me, a fine mystery. I imagine a person writing this in a distant technical writing department. She sits at a small wooden desk, looking out of a high window at a gray sky, thinking of the wind spinner with its heavy glass ball. Maybe she thinks of a child crawling beneath it, chirping in delight that such a thing is in the world, and she worries that she has perhaps not been precise enough in her warning to prevent some harm occurring so far away. She wants somebody to get it right — to do it so the words will do their magic. Or perhaps she appended the second line to the note as a kind of internal memo, meant for some higher-up in the department to note and act upon–but she is the one in charge of such things and the whole note goes out like that, as set, on its way.
Please don’t rephrase.