Another Halloween Lesson

Halloween has taught us a variety of important things. Don’t put a valuable candleholder in the pumpkin if you live in an area with any teenagers. Giving out fruit will ensure your home is TP’d. Apples floating in a bucket are not as easy to bite as at first it seems (they bounce away off your teeth). The younger the trick-or-treater, the more doped up on Xanax they will appear to be (“Tik-Tea,” they mutter, and after getting candy, “Tha,” as they stare at you a little longer than is comfortable while slowly turning to walk off).

And once again, Halloween reveals its teaching prowess. Actually, it taught this decades ago, but most people have yet to learn it. I came across the costume below in a consignment/antique store.

 

If you don’t see any issues with the package above, please get yourself a “word a day” calendar, or just read a new word from the dictionary each day. Or just watch The Family Guy, you’ll learn definitions for both those words within three episodes.

One might also be concerned that this costume, according to its tag, is for “drum majorette.” Since there’s no superhero I know of named “Drum Majorette,” the fact that the costume includes a blonde plastic mask is confusing, since there’s no specific face for a drum majorette. Perhaps in the ‘60s when this costume was produced, drum majorettes were all blonde creamy-colored girls with quarter-inch-thick eyelashes, but more likely it was just a pre-determined blank set that was painted into a variety of famous stars like Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Pocahontas, Generic Nurse, Susan B. Anthony, etc. Drum majorette was probably a generic idea that came with a mask just because the kit came with a mask, so here you go.

 What Halloween teaches us here is that PROOFREADERS ARE INVALUABLE. Without them, you will inevitably look stupid. Spell-checking software will not save you from mishaps like the one above. I saved my former company from embarrassing typos countless times, yet when I left, they decided not to hire a replacement for me. A company that is the largest of its kind in the world, with four major product brands, that creates and prints its own packages, catalogs, and promotional materials decided it doesn’t need a proofreader, the product managers are good enough.

I’d been lobbying for adding another proofreader to help with the enormous workload. To my knowledge, four years later, they do not have a proofreader. That, in my opinion, is just like the costume above.


(c) 2010 Scott Teel. All rights reserved.