Plainly beautiful: a rant.

Look, it may have seemed funkily ironic to call your clothes label Acne, or Fat Face, or Sweaty Betty, or Weird Fish, but what you have to remember is that a) lots of people have no sense of humour whatsoever; b) what most people need when it comes to clothes is reassurance; and c) on the whole people are looking to draw attention away from their acne, fat face, body odour, and inability to master the being-normal thing.

Still, I suppose it's also true that the beautiful smug people won't worry; and that the rest of us tend to follow wistfully, if hopelessly, in their steps; and also that words stop having any meaning if they're used wrongly often enough.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that it seems to have worked out, after all.

Word To Use Today: acne. This skin condition is sometimes called, rather splendidly, acne vulgaris. It should really be called acme, because it comes from a misreading  by medical men in the 1800s of the Greek akmē, eruption of the skin.

Hey, I wonder if the clothes label is a misreading of acme?