I HAVE A MINOR COMPLAINT: Enough with the Fake Quotes!
I am a human. I know humans and, global pandemics excepted, I speak to them. I have a general sense of the rhythms of their language. That’s why, when I read press releases, I get irritated by passages like this:
Jim Koch, Chairman and Founder of the Company, commented, "We achieved depletions growth of 36% in the third quarter. We believe that our depletions growth is attributable to our key innovations, quality and strong brands, as well as sales execution and support from our distributors.” [Snip here amid an endless quote.] “We have planned some major innovations to be introduced in 2021 for all our brands. These include Truly Iced Tea Hard Seltzer, Samuel Adams' Just the Haze, our first non-alcoholic beer, Dogfish Head Scratch-Made Canned Cocktails and Angry Orchard Hard Fruit Cider. We are confident in our ability to continue to innovate and build strong brands to help support our mission of long-term profitable growth."
Jim “commented?” No, he didn’t. Literally not one human on the planet reading this quote would think Jim got anywhere near this arrangement of words. It is standard, though in this case undreadably stilted, marketing dross: a drone of predictable talking points scraped from corporate reports, not even rewritten so that they could be plausibly laundered as human speech. Presumably, the idea is that someone would look at the eight-sentence “quote,” and put it in an article or, I don’t know, tweet. (It would actually take four full tweets to load that obese expulsion onto Twitter.com.) I question that.
In any case, pleasae quit attributing blatantly false quotes to real people. We are not fooled. It insults our intelligence. It accomplishes nothing.
Bonus COMPLAINT: Corporatese!
Just as I was preparing this post last night, I received a separate press release announcing the sale of Atlanta’s SweetWater to Canadian cannabis company Aphria. That’s big and interesting news! And the press release is actually full of really solid info (and some real quotes amid the fake ones!), like the sale price ($300 mil) and SweetWater’s value: “For the year ended December 31, 2019, SweetWater Brewing Company generated net revenue and adjusted EBITDA of $66.6 million and $22.1 million, respectively, and production volume increased 7% year-over-year to nearly 261,000 barrels.” They even hinted at some of the non-obvious reasons for buying SweetWater, including its deal with Delta Airlines. They also believe SweetWater will “accelerate Aphria’s entry into the US cannabis market.” The news is a lot more interesting than the usual brewery sale, and the details far more revealing.
However, the email announcing this news began with three sentences, two of which read (with some emphasis added):
SweetWater’s portfolio of beer brands, including the Flagship 420 Brand, aligns with a cannabis lifestyle and provides a scalable platform for expansion into the U.S. and Canada. The accretive acquisition will significantly expand Aphria’s addressable market and diversifies their product offerings by adding its first alcohol brand.
Oy! Corporatese is full of jargon, and I know it’s one of those game-recognizes-game things—other speakers of corporatese delight in these baroque formulations. (Most of these phrases have a technical meaning other speakers understand.) But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And since I’m the object of the press release, I have the standing to beg: please tone it down! Regular humans reading!