Spray and Pray

The phrase spray and pray can be interpreted in wildly different ways.

Maybe you’re looking for a job, so you put a dozen résumés out there. You’re hoping that one of those is a hit, though the places you’re applying to are all over the map. It’s more like a spray of businesses than any kind of predetermined pattern.

In online marketing, this kind of strategy was very common for the earliest years of world wide web history. Search really sucked, there was virtually no ad targeting, and the online world was a lot more like the wild west than today. The idea of targeting demographics long predates internet marketing, but my main point is that the web of the 2000s was nothing like the granular classification system we use today.

That meant that for every hundred people who saw your message, one might be interested. It was mostly a numbers game. You’d pray someone would be interested.

There are more literal meanings, too. If you are in a military combat situation where you are overwhelmed by the number of enemies and things are looking grim, this might be time for a spray and pray strategy. If you have ammo and are out of other options, this is certainly a choice you can make. You can’t really aim, so you have to just spray the bullets out there.

Another literal way this phrase hits is in agriculture. You spray a whole bunch of, say, fertilizer or pesticides across an entire field, ultimately unable to target the specific problem. The theory is that volume and luck eventually coincide.

There’s one more meaning I want to share with you today, just for fun.

Cats will often spray to mark their territory. Contrary to what I might have assumed growing up, spray is really just urine with a little extra something. That extra something is a readable message to other cats, generally to stay away from their territory. The cat is praying that other cats will stay away.

Then again, what I’m describing now is more like spray and prey. Cats aren’t going to be too happy when you’re in their marked territory.

Do you have any alternative interpretations (or bad dad jokes) you want to share?