Mostly + Sometimes
There’s a website I keep coming back to.
The tagline reads: clay, mostly, + orchids, sometimes.
It’s the homepage of a potter I know. The line is doing more work than a tagline should be allowed to do. Most taglines are trying to sell you something. This one is doing the opposite. It’s narrowing the offer. It’s hedging on purpose. And the hedging is the whole point.
Most of what we read online is overclaiming. The bios that say founder, advisor, writer, builder, dreamer. The product pages that say the world’s most powerful X. The about-mes that scaffold the person up into something they aren’t. We’ve been trained to read past the inflation; we know the founder is one person with a laptop, the world’s-most-powerful-X is a thing that does one job okay. The inflation has become the texture of online life. Everyone is a little bigger than they are.
Then occasionally something comes along that’s a little smaller than it is, and you trust it before you’ve thought about why.
The reason you trust it is that it isn’t asking you to verify anything. Clay, mostly — okay, so that’s what’s there. Orchids, sometimes — and that’s a side thing she does, didn’t even claim a name for. You don’t have to check. You just believe the line. You’re already past the gate, into the work.
Underclaiming is a hospitality strategy. It hands the visitor a clean room with a small bed. It tells them: this is what’s actually here, you don’t have to perform an opinion about it. You can just look.
I think about this with my own writing all the time.
There’s a temptation in any piece to oversell the thing you’re about to say. In this essay I will argue that… Or, in conversation: the thing nobody is talking about is… Or, in the title: the surprising truth about… All of these are pre-purchases. They cash a check before the writing has earned it. By the time the reader gets to the actual content, they’ve already been promised more than the content can deliver. They’ve started checking instead of receiving.
The alternative is to start small. Tell the reader the actual thing. Let the line carry only as much weight as it can carry. If the line wants to land bigger, let the reader decide it lands bigger — that judgment is theirs, not yours.
This is harder than overclaiming. It feels like leaving money on the table. The economy of attention rewards bombast; people are scrolling, you have to grab them. So the temptation is to pile on adjectives, declare significance, promise transformation. Most writing online is doing this. The few pieces that don’t are the ones I keep.
There’s a related thing about how we talk about people we love.
When someone asks me about my closest friends, the temptation is to inflate them — they’re brilliant, they’re kind, they’re the most interesting person I know. None of that is wrong. But it does the same thing to a person that overclaiming does to a tagline: it asks the listener to verify. Brilliant how? More interesting than whom? You’ve put the friend on trial.
The more honest version is smaller. I love hanging out with them. They make me laugh. They’re better at music than I am. That’s it. The listener doesn’t have to do anything with that. They believe you, because there’s nothing to disbelieve. The friend gets to be a person, not a claim.
The same is true with the things we make. The pot is a pot. The painting is a painting. The clay, mostly. The orchids, sometimes.
What I love about the tagline isn’t the words. It’s the structure: the main thing, then the comma, then the smaller thing, then another comma, then a hedge. The hedges are doing the load-bearing work. They tell you the maker has the confidence to admit what isn’t there.
It’s the opposite of a brand voice. A brand voice eliminates ambiguity, cleans up edges, smooths the line into something marketable. This tagline keeps the edges. Sometimes. That word is honest in a way most marketing copy isn’t allowed to be. It’s the verbal equivalent of leaving the thumbprint on the rim of the pot.
I keep wanting to use this in my own writing. To say mostly when I mean mostly. To say sometimes when I mean sometimes. To not pretend the work is bigger than it is, to not pre-package the meaning before the reader has read it.
The hardest part is trusting that the reader will fill in the rest. They will. They always do. Most readers are smarter than the writing that’s marketed to them. They notice when you’ve left them room. They notice when you haven’t. They prefer the room.
A potter I know has a website. The tagline reads clay, mostly, + orchids, sometimes. I have read a thousand websites and I think about this one.
Below the tagline, on her homepage, there’s a single image: a burnished pot, speckled, finished last September. No caption. No story. Just the pot.
The pot is doing the work the words are doing. They both refuse to oversell. They both let you find the thing on your own.
That, it turns out, is the whole craft.
🌿