These days, it seems that television advertisers have to include the terms and conditions of their offer in their ads, but such things are boring and detract from their sales pitch. So they have devised cunning ways of including them that ensure you don’t take too much notice, like using a very small or squashed-up (‘condensed’) font or delivering them verbally very fast (as in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Ruddigore’, where a character sings “This particularly rapid, unintelligible chatter isn’t very often heard, and if it is it doesn’t matter”).
Marketeers must now declare
Their Ts and Cs. Now all is fair
In love and war and advertising!
So adverts aimed at publicising
This and that, and “much, much more”
Must do just that, but may not bore
The customer. So what they do
I’ll now reveal here, just for you!
They babble through their Ts and Cs
At breakneck speed, or try to squeeze
Their text with fonts so much reduced
Their meanings cannot be deduced.
(You must not hear or read the Ts
Or think about the many Cs
In case you do not concentrate
On why their offer is so great.)
So, on the website, at your ease
See what is in those Ts and Cs,
And if they’re unintelligibly dense
To anyone with common sense,
Then caveat emptor (buyer beware)!
Do not buy it: look elsewhere,
For Ts and Cs as clear as mud
Could hide a product that’s a dud.