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As copywriters, we are very aware of the many everyday words that have become debased by overuse, inappropriate use or actual abuse. But even copywriters are occasionally surprised by an especially blatant example of linguistic aberration. Such as the ones I met over the New Year period…

On a recent visit to Glasgow just after Hogmanay (what the Scots call New Year, for the very few of you who may not know), I was both amused and appalled by a series of linguistic encounters. The first was the word “bargain”. The power of this simple term is fascinating – perfectly sober, respectable people lose all sense of proportion and, sometimes, of propriety, upon hearing that something is a “bargain”. The female of the species is especially susceptible to the subsonic vibrations that must, I feel, be the key to this word’s potency. Having bought a garment (but especially a pair of shoes), for a magisterial price, my wife is perfectly capable of widening her eyes in disbelief as a I stagger around moaning and clutching various cash-sensitive parts of my anatomy: “But it was a bargain”, she proclaims: “they took 40% off!”

This abuse of a term for its psychological potency is, however, as nothing to the ghastly and growing misuse of the word “bespoke”. So degraded is our cultural awareness – or else so cynical is the average marketing copywriter – that one finds “bespoke” regularly used to describe off-the-shelf goods of all kinds, even when it is apparent that no attempt whatsoever has been made to tailor or customise the item to an individual’s specific requirements. In short, it has become a meaningless term of marketing differentiation, designed to imply that something is “special” just because you call it so. It goes without saying that the generic word “special” was degraded decades ago, but it upsets me very much that “bespoke” – such an elegant word, with such a fine tradition of courtly, courteous and above all correct usage by craftsmen engaged in producing genuinely bespoke goods to very specific requirements – should be going the same way.

That copywriters may not be cynical so much as merely ignorant was brought home to me by the third linguistic incident: on a large poster advertising a civic celebration of the New Year holiday, one of the incitements was “Free canopies”. Baffled, I wondered why providing canopies free of charge should be regarded as a particularly enticing inducement for revellers. And then it dawned on me: the buffoon who had written these words had, no doubt, been instructed to write “free canapés“. Ignorant of the meaning not only of the latter term (possibly excusable), but also (much less excusable) of the former word’s meaning, the hapless cretin had put down the first thing which came into his head, displaying a spectacularly narrow (and utterly urban) combination of underdeveloped sensibility and non-existent social mobility. I fled back to the Highlands, which true to Scotland’s cultural traditions, are full of remarkably knowledgeable people (as J. M. Barrie puts it in one of his plays: “Being Scottish, there’s almost nothing I don’t know” [The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, 1918]).

This tenet does not, unfortunately, appear to apply to Glaswegians…