PERSONAL ESSAY | MEMOIR
Livin’ La Vida Lorem Ipsum
When Does Meaning Really Matter?
Once upon a time, I worked as a copywriter. My job consisted of creating blatantly emotional language to manipulate people into spending money on something I had little to no belief in. So, lying, more or less.
I was a bit startled the first time a co-worker (a graphic designer) approached me with a visual they’d created and a request, but I quickly learned it was the norm.
“I need this much copy,” they’d say, configuring their fingers into some measure of space, anywhere from the size of a postage stamp to a dollar bill.
At first, I responded with a question that baffled them.
“How many words do you need?”
Soon I learned they had no conception of how many words — much less how many characters — they needed to fill the space they wanted to be filled with words. Any words. They didn’t care. They often didn’t read them anyway.
At the time, it seemed to me a blatant disrespect of language, and thus of meaning itself.
As an autistic person who has experienced life (at least the part of life that wasn’t excruciatingly painful) through the written word, I found this troubling.
