Both, which means neither

Every year the last item on the agenda is a tone decision, which is the kind that does not survive a week like this.

The question is whose weekend it is. The holiday is expected on Friday, depending on the sighting. Mother's Day is fixed, the twenty-first, the Saturday after it. Two occasions, forty-eight hours, one feed.

Look at who is in the room. Everyone has been fasting since dawn. The day ends at two. Half the room is on leave from tomorrow and somebody is travelling. The creative was approved a month ago, and reopening it means a night of work for somebody who has already been asked twice this month.

So the meeting produces the sentence it always produces. Do both.

That is not a decision at all. It describes what would have happened if the meeting had never been held.

Both means one asset. A greeting at the top, the holiday's colours, a line for the mothers underneath, and a caption that has to be true of two completely different rooms.

Watch what that costs. Everything that would have made either occasion land is specific, and specific is the one thing the compound version cannot carry. The second day and who visits whom. The mother in another city and the call that has to be made before ten. The clothes bought at midnight. The woman who cooked every night of the month and is thanked the day it ends. None of it survives, because none of it is true of both.

What is left is a sentence with two occasion names in it and nothing underneath them, going out to a reader who is living one of the two and will give it a second and a half.

When nobody chooses between two occasions, the template chooses, and the template always chooses both. Both is the only answer that reads as neither.