The art of stress
If you use WordPress, then you know that at the bottom of the Dashboard in the administrator's area, there is an array of gray boxes, advertising recent news items regarding WordPress features, development, and related blogging issues in general. The other day, one item in particular caught me eye. It is pictured on the right. The line-break between the words stress and free caused me to read the first line as the main title and the second line as the sub-title, as if it had been written thus.
The Art of Stress: Free Blogging
So my first interpretation of this title was that the article would make the case that free blogging (either blogging pro bono or using blogging tools that cost nothing like WordPress and the like) causes not just stress, but the kind of stress that is somehow aesthetically superior. All right, that last part is a little ridiculous, but since I am relatively new to blogging, almost anything seems plausible.
Nevertheless, I did manage to nail down the intended interpretation which would have been greatly facilitated by the addition of a hyphen:
The Art of Stress-Free Blogging
This reminded me of a puzzle in a book I spent many hours with as a child. It goes something like this:
The president of Flatz Beer, Inc. was distinctly proud of his company's product and so he commissioned that this motto be placed on the backs of all of the company's delivery trucks: "Flatz is our finest beer. There is no beer so good." After it was completed, the trucks looked like this:
Soon after the company started using the trucks, people could be seen laughing when the trucks were making deliveries. Sales plummeted and the company was forced to remove the motto from the trucks.
Why?
I wish I could print the answer to this question upside-down at the bottom of the page, but alas, html formatting has not advanced that far. But most of you would probably not need to look at the answer anyway because this one is not too difficult: When the doors where open, the right-hand door alone reads, "our beer is no good"—not exactly words of extolment.
Of course, the problem with the article title above is relatively minor compared to the Flatz Beer fiasco, but still, the take-away lesson seems to be that in the current era of blogging and rss and various web 2.0 technologies, we cannot presume that the text that we write will always appear in the original formatting we intended. Insofar as possible, we need to anticipate other formats in which our text may be rendered and plan the text accordingly. Unfortunately, this no doubt adds stress to the task of blogging—especially if you're doing it for free.
[Update (2 Sep 2007): I happened to find one reference to this puzzle in a web forum at Ambrosia Software. Scroll down near the bottom to find it or just do a page search for "Flatz".]