Which leaves you wondering what's under the hood and if your husband will ever be able to find it.
Or take Coke's famed Chinese disaster in which an attempt to render "Coca Cola" phoenetically into Chinese (make it sound like "Coca Cola" when you said it out loud) wound up inviting citizens of the middle kingdom to "Bite the wax tadpole"
But it is possible to take it too far - as anyone who has ever worked in an office will know. This little gem of advice for Pooh Bear managers (manager-of-very-little-brain) is a classic case:
There is no resort more certain for the feeble mind than the resort to paperwork. If your wetware version is still at Commodore64 and you absorb information at a rate suggesting that the only way to get data into you is to stick hole-punched cards up something fundamental, then critiquing of documents is for you.
Let's face it. You've got almost no hope of actually understanding what the document is talking about; you were promoted based on your mastery of style over substance- and your ability to kiss other people's card reader. You certainly don't understand what the author is talking about and you don't want to appear stupid. So don't go for substantial critique - we're looking for critique in a vacuum here - and if you stand side on to a mirror, contort yourself into an odd position and shine a torch in your earhole, the extent of the vacuum will become obvious.
Start with font. You probably have a corporate style guide hidden somewhere that no one can easily find. If the document's font doesn't comply with the 12.5 sans serif New Moron that is only installed on a tenth of the computers in the company, put a snide little note at the top of the document and make sure you imply that any competent employee would know these things intuitively and that your precious - or at least overpaid - time should not have been wasted by intern level mistakes of this kind.
If the font is ok then the heading style probably isn't. Or the line spacing. The bullet style on the dot points perhaps? Thickness of the underline? You can't be too pedantic in executing your sacred duty as the Defender of the Corporate Image.
Every so often you'll get a smart-arse. There's always someone who will not only dot the 'i's but will have measured those dots to make sure that they are exactly .05 the size of the i - just on the legal limit. This clown thinks he's going to get a document through without an edit. As if! Where would the pleasure in your workday come from if you couldn't keep them dangling; striving futilely to write just one single draft document before they retire.
Now you need to bring out the big guns. The novice manager tries to correct grammar at this point. Mistake. Why? Because grammar is either right or wrong. The author has grounds for appeal if you make a mistake about their participles. The seasoned pedant at this point starts to rearrange sentences and paragraphs at random. Justify the changes in vague, subjective terms like 'polish' and 'tone'. You can never be wrong about those.
And, if you get the corrected draft back too soon, correct your own corrections and
send it back again.
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