Monday, September 15, 2014

Requesting Clearance

Sale! Certain words 11 percent off!

Clearance sale! All A’s must go! Only one left in stock!

In this screen grab from the 1984 sci-fi classic The Terminator, a door is ajar … and a word is jarred.


Before he attempts to terminate the woman whose unborn son will one day lead a human revolution against machines, Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing the titular cyborg from a post-apocalyptic future, steals a car and goes “shopping” for guns. As he enters the shop, attentive viewers learn that a storewide clearance sale is in progress. Well, sort of.

CLEARANCE is missing an A, clearly. It should have been stocked with two; one has been terminated. An A is in the CLEAR, but the other has been removed from the shelves, preventing us from getting ANCE-y.

Adding another A to this gun shop’s door would make me trigger-happy, so to speak. So, after the R, clear the way for an A. Have I made myself … understood?

Editor’s note: STOREWIDE is one word. If it can’t be painted on one line, it should be hyphenated. Perhaps the hyphen was left out intentionally, for cosmetic reasons. That is why I didn’t harp on this particular STOREWIDE renovation in today’s post. I couldn’t afford CLEARNCE the same luxury; it, like a Terminator emerging from the fiery wreckage of an exploded tanker truck, is a shell of its former self. The world needed to know. And the next time someone rifles a letter from a word, I’ll be there to tell you all about it, readers. That’s right: I’ll be back.

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