Who else is watching Deutschland 83 at the moment? It’s Channel 4’s German language TV series about the Cold War. Set in 1983 (obvs) it has a great soundtrack that includes New Order’s Blue Monday, Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics and Modern Love by David Bowle (RIP). So far, I’ve learnt about four words of German. But it got me wondering...
I was thinking about Winston Churchill the other day, as you do. Actually I was mostly thinking about some of the rhetorical devices Churchill used in his speeches, such as anaphora. And that’s because I’d written different sectors, different clients, different countries in some copy and I was explaining to the client how that was ok. Anaphora, you may recall is...
Ahhh the poor hyphen. Of all the horizontal punctuation marks, it’s the shortest and fattest and a little bit unloved. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary culled 16,000 of the little blighters back in 2007, squishing previously hyphenated words together or dropping the hyphen completely. The humble hyphen is used to join two or more words together to form a new...
This year's Turner Ink Christmas card featured my favourite type of lingo: slaaaaaaang. And if you're wondering what the heck they said - here are the translations. Cockney Rhyming Slang After Christmas kidney, turn off the custard and take the oxo or a sherbet to the rub-a-dub with a couple of chinas, then spend your bangers or cadge some bread for a few...
As a paid up sarf Londoner, there’s nothing I like more than a bit o’ slang, be it street, polari or cocker-nee. Unfortunately, I don't get to write it much in my everyday copywriting life. Strange that. So for a giggle, this year’s Christmas cards are written completely in slang. If you can fathom what they say, you could be in...
One of the best things about being a Londoner is that you’re never more than a stone’s throw away from some of the world’s greatest art. Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne at The National; Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergere at The Courtauld; or Matisse’s Snail at Tate Modern are all a Tube ride away. As a history of art...
Turner Ink will be closed from Wednesday December 25 to Wednesday January 1. We'll be back in the office on Thursday January 2. Have a very merry Christmas and happy New Year!...
Every year I send a Turner Ink Christmas card to clients of the past, clients of the present and a bunch of suppliers and other good sorts that make Turner Ink tick. Over the years we've done quizzes, buzzword bingo and word searches. But this year we decided to let Twitter make the card, exquisite corpse stylee. So, over a number...
Whenever I need copy translating for a client I whizz it over to Tongue Tied to do the biz. All their translators are native speakers and understand the nuances of advertising copy. They also know their idioms from their elbows. So they've put together the following list of idioms, their foreign language equivalent and their literal translations for your amusement....
This article was originally written for Retail IT and appeared on their blog in February 2013. In all the excitement of getting your ecommerce site up and running it’s easy to overlook product descriptions. Surely the images are enough to sell the product, aren’t they? And one line of text copied from someone else’s site will do the trick won’t it?...
