free variable

Last week I received a greeting card that arrived mutilated and wrapped in a protective plastic bag.¹ The card itself was delightful, but the copy on the bag (pictured below) exhibited the sort of linguistic and rhetorical infelicity usually only found in instruction manuals for discount electronics or in White House press briefings.

We’ve always had great mail carriers, and I am not blaming any of our local postal workers for the shredded card, which was an isolated accident, or for the scattershot collation of words and punctuation on the USPS damaged-mail bag, which they are surely powerless to correct. But the copy is truly execrable, even by the standards of evasive bureaucratic prose.

Note especially the abject misuse of prepositions, odd turns of phrase,² the sentence fragment, the alternately unctuous and passive-aggressive tone, and the final implication that my post office strives to eliminate not the incidence of damaged letters, but the damaged letters themselves. Indeed, I was left wondering whether this explanation would have read any better in its original language.

¹ That gum you like is going to come back in style.
² In particular, “loose in the mails” sounds like it might refer to a common intestinal ailment of Elizabethan England.