IT was Napoleon who said never to interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake. However there’s an important caveat to add to that aphorism, which is – unless your enemy is Scotland in Union (SiU), in which case point and laugh. Scotland in Union is best known for the leak of its donors’ list to the media, which showed that an organisation billing itself as a grassroots anti-independence movement is in fact bankrolled by the wealthy and the privileged.

SiU’s main activity appears to be organising the so-called Green Ink Brigade of letter writers to newspapers, invariably decrying something or other that the SNP has done and not actually giving a positive argument for Scotland to remain a part of the UK. Members also frequent the comments section of the online editions of newspapers, where they make personal remarks about the writers of articles having the temerity to do public crowdfunders for their pro-indy work, instead of taking the respectable SiU approach, which is to solicit members of the aristocracy and the wealthy in secret for a few grand.

READ MORE: Scotland in Union in crisis after donor details are leaked

I myself have come under attack from SiU. After publishing a Gaelic map of Glasgow on my blog, a prominent member of SiU took to social media to denounce me as a Gaelic Imperialist, a badge I now wear with pride. He was so upset that I had the temerity to produce a Gaelic map of Glasgow, a city where Celtic place names are thick on the ground, that I went and produced a Gaelic map of Edinburgh for no reason other than to annoy him. It’s safe to say that with SiU, the independence movement is not dealing with a credible opponent. We are the Interpol to their Keystone Cops. Please, please, please make them the official anti-independence campaign in the next referendum. Scottish politics can be terribly po-faced at times, and we could all do with the laughs.

There’s something about so-called grassroots social media campaigns against independence that is spectacularly inept. This may not be unrelated to the fact that they’re typically as organically grassroots as astroturf. During the independence campaign we had Vote No Borders, an expensively funded, ahem “grassroots”, campaign with no apparent membership, which for some mysterious reason got itself headlines on the BBC news while real grassroots organisations supporting independence were sidelined and ignored. It took approximately 30 seconds for independence supporters to rebrand this expensively and professionally developed campaign as Vote Nob Orders, which was a far more accurate summation of what it really represented. We had the slogan UKOK, whose originators obviously never realised was too close to U KOK for comfort. Online anti-independence campaigns are suspiciously phallic. Calling Dr Freud.

The latest social media campaign from SiU is very much in the tradition of this tone deaf approach to the sensibilities of people who have no prior associations with, or loyalties to, the message that opponents of independence are trying to get across. Supporters of the organisation have come up with a clever new meme.

Well I say “clever” ... It’s clever in the same way as it’s clever of your new puppy to stand on the newspaper with its front paws, while its rear end is peeing all over the carpet.

The campaign consists of getting opponents of independence to replace their social media avatars with a circle apeing the Yes logo used by independence supporters. In the same font, and against a background of the same shade of blue, the logo, pictured, reads Yawn. It achieved a small amount of notoriety when some clown in the Edinburgh polis used it on the official police twitter account, an incident which the police assured us was an error and the person responsible will be getting a rocket up the backside which ought to ensure that they won’t be yawning for a while.

Apparently the Yawn avatar is supposed to signify the bearer’s boredom with talk of another referendum. However the developers of this campaign forgot that boredom is merely a secondary association of the word yawn. When dealing with slogans, it’s vitally important to consider the other associations of the word or words, some of which might be more salient in the minds of readers who don’t share your mindset or prior assumptions.

It’s a bit like a building services company printing the words BEST ERECTIONS in huge letters on a billboard, then being surprised that most people who see it don’t think of quality scaffolding. There was a sunglasses store in the US whose advertising slogan was “Sitting on faces since 2001”, and a one-hour dry-cleaning service which informed the public: “Drop your pants here for immediate attention.” Then there was the student TV channel, also in the US, whose slogan was “Students turn us on.” Because that’s not creepy at all.

What all these logo fails have in common is that the word associations which were forefront in the minds of their creators are not the same as the associations forefront in the minds of people who are not already invested in that business or campaign. That’s precisely the same mistake made by SiU.

The primary association of the word yawn is of course with sleeping and torpor. Boredom is a secondary association. The avatar fails because those who come to it with no prior knowledge don’t immediately associate it with boredom with the pro-independence message of the SNP. They associate it with sleep and with drifting off into a passive unconsciousness.

When I first saw this new avatar, I thought that opponents of independence were telling Scotland to go back to sleep. Shut up, go back to sleep Scotland. Let the big boys and girls in Westminster decide your future. This is an avatar that says: “Scotland, it’s past your bedtime.” When you see someone using this avatar on social media, you should ask them if their mummy knows that they’re using the computer.

Independence means a Scotland that is awake and aware and is an active agent in shaping its own destiny. British nationalism means sleeping and passivity. That is the message that SiU is telling us with its logo.

The Yawn avatar is more subconsciously revealing of the attitudes of SiU than they are themselves aware. We should encourage them to keep using it. You go back to bed SiU, Scotland is staying up to talk about grown-up stuff. We have our eyes wide open.