Seen on a giant ad hoarding on my way home today: “Imagine… expressing your emotions with optical zoom”

I can’t even begin to understand how I have successfully expressed my emotions all these years without an optical zoom (save the built in one, where you move the lens assembly and imaging surfaces closer to the object being imaged, often by leaning forward). This said, I am English and am therefore incapable of expressing any emotions in the first place.

In case you were wondering, yes, the same phone is also described as “Completely Camera-esque”, which for my money is right up there with Leicester police declaring that circumstances surrounding the man’s death “might have been suspicious”.

These obviously aren’t mistakes: I think “expressing your emotions” is meant somehow to be understood as a noun, a warmingly human synonym for “Samsung G800″. And it’s certainly the G800 which has the optical zoom, not my emotions, nor even the expression of them. Likewise “Completely Camera-esque” is not simply verbal terrorism, trying to inject into our ailing minds some subtle new partial quality of camera-esqueness (might such things be camera-esque-esque?), but rather has some memorable sounds in and is just compellingly awkward enough to stick in the mind. Perhaps. Now I see why I didn’t go into branding.