it says in big letters with lots of exclamation marks- !!IMPORTANT NOTICE: for comfort and safety, read Safety&Comfort Guide!! If they had only put two or even three exclamation marks i might not have taken any notice of it. But the fourth one really made it stand out, and thanks to the usefull Safety&Comfort Guide, i can now use the keyboard safely and comfortably. I can't believe i've been so reckless with using the keyboard in the past, i could have endangered my life and the lives of others.
The person who wrote that sticker clearly has a poetic imagination. What first strikes me is that the words comfort and safety are repeated but reversed; it's not until we get to the last line of the piece that we realise that the "Safety&Comfort Guide" is the raison d'etre of the poem. But looking back, the preceding line is a pre-emptive re-interpretation of the poem's theme, presenting a reversed "comfort and safety" in place of "Safety&Comfort", making the effect of the third line stand out as repetitive and emphatic while also new and distinctive. Once you realise what the poet has done you start to look back over other techniques he has used; the exclamation marks before the beginning of the first line (reminiscent of written Spanish), while initially appearing clumsy, now take on the demeanour of a deliberately subverted punctuation style: the author is attempting to disrupt conventional norms of language. The entire piece is enclosed in a parenthesis of exclamation marks - the first line is capitalised as if it were a title, although the preceding parenthetic exclamations remove the separateness and significance of this capitalised title phrase. The "Safety&Comfort Guide" itself is presented with no spaces between the words and the unexpected use of an ampersand where the full word "and" was used before. The effect is a sudden jarring awareness of the limitations of the written word fully to express new meanings; the poet is attempting to smash open our linguistic conventions and lay bare the banality of conventional poetry. Genius.
I thought that i had too much spare time and that my life was going no where, then i read this. Now i realise you are in a much worse state than myself. Thank you Showmet, you having given me the will to live again.
Rolf indeed. Hooray for chiasmus! Of course I must maintain however that multiple exclamation marks are the product of a diseased mind.
But did you read it ? Dodgy on the nerve system if you don't take care ! Though the mouse is usually more of a problem.
