No, Copywriter Community, No Anthimeria For You!

I was watching Sunday morning network television, a virtual parade of self-important talking heads, when an ad came on that made me stop and comment to my English teacher wife. "That's not a verb," I said.

"It is not," She answered.

The offending word was brain. As in, "Want to brain better?" The little Wiley Coyote in my brain held up the little sign that said "Yikes" before plummeting into the abyss that is bad copywriting.

Acme Corp had a very targeted buyer persona

I don't want to give the name of the product for two reasons. First, it was an ad for one of those brain booster supplements, and they are at best of questionable effectiveness and at worst downright dangerous.

By the way, the Ten Dollar Word in the title, Anthimeria, "means using one part of speech as another," according to Wikipedia.

SO this leads us to one of my rules of copywriting that might seem confusing at first. Namely, don't break the rules of Grammar, until you can. Copywriters that try to be too edgy by inventing words or committing anthimeria risk sounding forced and artificial. If you are working to hard to be one of the cool kids when writing ad copy, you aren't one of them.

When is it okay to break the rules? When it bubbles up from the beginnings of common usage. If you've repeatedly seen something in memes, or some other User Generated Content, then you can use it. But even then it has a short shelf life.

One great example is the word "Irregardless." When I was a kid, it was a word I heard a lot in New England, prounounced "I-reh-gahd-less," but if you used it in polite company you got called out. Then it came into common use, rising in popularity to the point where it was even used in business names and ad copy. Now it's in Webster's Dictionary, so it's kind of jumped the shark.

So if you are going to use "brain" as a verb, then there is a process. Somebody on Reddit or Twitter has to get away with it first. Then it's fair game.

Worse even than the Wesley Crusher episodes of Next Generation

Until then, if you want to be edgy, then you can post memes from the worst episode of Star Trek, The Original Series.