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| Gretchen Weiners - stymied semantically with 'Fetch |
“Amaze-bags!”
I dropped a straight flush and my new catchphrase in one go.
“NOOOOOO!” came the collective response of card playing circle.
“But why?” I pressed. “It’s so much nicer than ‘amaze-balls’.”
“Drop it; it’ll never happen,” demanded Andy.
“I think you’ll find, I dropped an Ace, King, Queen and Jack of Hearts,” I boasted wrly.
“I’m talking about that ridiculous word!”
I felt like Gretchen Weiners facing off against Regina George in her lexical defence of ‘fetch’.
Granted, I’m no E.E. Cummings but swapping a Polly Push Lock for a less salubrious sac shouldn’t have amounted to half the aberration of which I was being accused.
Clearly this wasn’t my desired audience. In order for ‘amaze-bags’ to go viral, I needed it to be endorsed and spoken into existence; rather than forced into early retirement with ‘fierce’ and ‘funky’.
A week later I attended a cocktail party – a perfect milieu for testing the lexical waters. Fashion folk love bizarre epithets. I was cognizant however that Andy may well have had a point. Victoria Beckham suffered a seismic failure with ‘major’; Rachel Zoe panned with ‘bananas’ and Andre Leon Talley’s ‘dreckitude’ was well...’drek’.
My semantic debut came with a side of hors d’oeuvres. Those tomato and red onion mini quiches evoked a tandem of ‘oohs and aahs’. It was now or never.
“Amaze-bags!” I cooed, eliciting a flutter of chuckles.
I regaled my past troubles of positioning said shibboleth in the general patois.
“You need a critical mass,” advised one of the partygoers.
“Or Jedward,” offered another.
“If my initial market sample was any indication, the viral capacity of ‘amaze-bags’ was not unlike that of a mild cold – unwelcome, irritating and hopefully gone in a week.
Marketing is all about timing and mine was all wrong. It was time to admit defeat and tuck ‘amaze-bags’ back into my rhetorical clutch, assuring myself the time would come to ‘fetch’ it again.
