For my day job we have a very large email marketing business. It’s normal conversation to talk about what others are doing, so when I got the following subject line in an email I laughed and showed it to my coworkers:
Make someone ugly cry. Adobe can help.
What I wrong as a comment was, “I know what they meant, but that’s the worst subject line I’ve ever seen.” It sounds like Adobe’s offering to help you chase ugly kids around the playground and make them cry.
A couple days after that post, a coworker calls me over and says, “You posted something the other day and I’ve been meaning to ask you about it…I don’t get it? You wrote, I know what they mean … but I don’t. I don’t know what they mean? Is it like the optical illusion with the old woman and the young woman and I can only see the old woman?”
So I told him, “Claire Danes in the Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo+Juliet.”
Turns out there’s actually several blogs and tumblrs dedicated to her cry face in particular, and she’s even been asked about it in interviews 🙂
I had to read that a dozen times for I started to understand. I gather they’re trying to use the phrase “ugly cry” as a single verb. I ugly cry, you ugly cry, he / she / it ugly cries, et cetera.
It’s not terribly good communication.
Perhaps they could try “make someone all alone beweep their outcast state. Adobe can help.”
kj