The Walking Dead – copywriting and the fight against zombie words
As anyone who has ever binged heartily on ‘The Walking Dead’ knows, there can be some pretty powerful residual effects. Most worrying amongst these is a disturbing urge to smash slow moving pedestrians in the head with a shovel.
Less potentially convictable is a tendency to view aspects of your own life through the weary eyes of the shovel-wielders in the show. More specifically, twisted by an over-indulgence in the slobber and gore of a TV show, you begin to examine your own world as if the zombie apocalypse were just meandering grumblingly around the corner.
Only for me, inescapably tethered to the alphabet like a sacrificial goat, the zombies I began to recognise in my own world were not drooling noisily at the window but were in fact on the page.
Zombie words are those that used to be full of life and purpose and now, struck down by a strange and virulent disease, are dead. Or at least, un-dead, dragging their inanimate forms around the page with all the verve of a recently smashed moth.
The infection, in this instance, is less about having your ankle munched by a frothing, dead-eyed paperboy but rather stems from simple over-use.
Amongst the droning, plodding victims of this contagion are words you probably use in your copy every day – often not staring at them closely enough to notice that flesh is oozing from their bones like a Malteser in a bulky man’s armpit.
Words like ‘Amazing’, ‘Genuine’ and ‘Discover’ are the most frequent and formidable victims. Where once they could communicate awe, authenticity and adventure respectively, now they squat dimly amongst your copy in a pool of their own drool and decay.
Worse still, like true zombies they gnaw mindlessly at the life around them – dragging strong and vital copy down to their own flaccid, fetid level.
Zombie words, much like torturous fan-boy analogies, are a common toxin in modern copywriting. Trapped in our own habits and comforts, copywriters often don’t notice when a word that used to mean something now feels tired and implausible.
As a matter of course, we should conduct zombie sweeps at regular intervals – combing through our copy to make sure that dead words aren’t spreading their malaise amongst the living.
And of course, when you track down these zombie words, there’s only one proper course of action. And that’s a shovelling.