Sentence First shop – where grammar is glamorous

If you read this blog on its web page (as opposed to via email, say), you may have noticed a new image in the sidebar, and a new page, linking to the Sentence First shop. It now has a .com address only; I closed the .ie page for simplicity’s sake.

The shop has bags, T-shirts, hoodies and other clothes, badges, mugs, and more. Its general themes are wordplay, language, and bad puns. Omit needles swords, for example, is a spin on Strunk and White’s popular dictum Omit needless words. Less cryptic ones include:

Grammar is glamorous (etymologically speaking)

and

Recursive hipsters were into being into things before they were hip before it was hip

I’ll be adding more from time to time.

If you want some item that isn’t shown, email or tweet me or leave a comment below, and I’ll see what I can do when time allows. Other feedback will be happily received; cries of “capitalist sell-out” are also permitted.

Spreadshirt, the shop’s host, has a special offer from today, Tuesday 10 September, till a week from now – free standard shipping when you buy two or more items. Just use the voucher code FALL2013.

It’s all cut up. Uh huh huh.

Today’s signs inadvertently boast avant-garde literary credentials. (Wait, come back!) This quality is, of course, imputed by yours truly; the enjoyment of many signs requires a certain whimsical contrivance.

The strangeness of these summer sale signs, or more properly posters, is easily overlooked. On first glance they appear entirely unremarkable:

Yes, the bold colours and unfussy font effectively convey key information: a summer sale is taking place, and some items are available at 40% of their former price – or “up to 60% off”, as it is conventionally expressed. Cynical shoppers ignore the percentage, since it might refer only to a handful of undesirable items; moreover, the bigger the sale, the greater the rip-off the rest of the time. (There’s that cynicism.)

But from an aesthetico-linguistic point of view, the posters are a delight. See how the two key words were presented: “Sum Sale mer”. How wonderful! Had someone in the store’s marketing department been studying Dada or practising cut-up writing? Was the store selling anti-nuance cream?

Probably not. But the possibility brightened an already bright and sunny summer’s day – an especially pleasant thing to think about after three days of almost incessant Irish rain.