Is it just me or have continuity writers really started scraping the bottom of the barrel? As someone who used to write commercials for a living (okay, technically, it was for beer money, I was on a paid college internship and was living in the college dorms…) I know that I tend to be more critical than the average viewer, but is anyone else bothered when something makes absolutely no sense?
This morning I was set off by a commercial for a shoe store. The commercial began with the line "Imagine more shoes than you could possibly imagine..." I know that I must have seen the spot before, but this morning I must have been awake enough to logically parse the sentence. The instruction contains the seeds for its own downfall.
They may as well have told you to watch something that cannot be seen, go somewhere that cannot be reached, or do something that is patently impossible. I believe they were trying to get across that they had some implausibly large number of choices. But is the hyperbole really necessary?
Besides, could it even be possible to have more shoes that one can imagine? You'd have to be pretty dull not to be able to imagine a large number of shoes. Heck, I had no problem with the theory of The Shoe Event Horizon as posited by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy.
This theory basically states that when a society goes into decline, they become depressed and spend a disproportionate amount of time looking down at their shoes. They cheer themselves up by buying a new pair of shoes. The more depressed the society, the more shoes they buy. Eventually, it becomes economically unviable to build anything but shoe stores. The society collapses; the population evolves into birds and leave behind nothing but an entire geological layer of nothing but compressed shoes.
Don't tell me I can’t imagine a large quantity of shoes! Rather than making me want to buy shoes there, it made me think that someone with logic that faulty didn't deserve my business.
It puts me in mind of that grocery store in the UK that uses a tagline that has no noun in it: "every little helps." I tried to never shop at Tesco unless there was no other choice… and there was always an alternative.
Wherever you are today, I wish you a day surrounded by people who use impeccable logic and good grammar!
Don Bergquist – April 15, 2010 – Lakewood, Colorado, USA
2 comments:
Recently I've been noticing some of the same things that you've been discussing recently in your blog. One of the most noticeable things I've noticed is in your blog today about a "commercial for a shoe store commercial".
I know that my observations will be somewhat different from yours but hopefully you will find them at least a little useful.
First of all, in regards to sentence structure, I think that when you analyze a sentence like "imagine more shoes than you could possibly imagine" most of us who are over 45 would think something like "they should have said "picture in your mind more shoes than you could possibly imagine". When I went to school I would have gotten a decent grade for the "picture in your mind" version and a very poor grade for using "imagine" twice in the same sentence. But if I was in the room where the people were developing this advertisement and said "let's try picture in your mind instead of imagine" I would have probably been given a dirty look by at least one or two people. If any of those present would have been in their 20s or 30s they might have said "don't you think that imagine sounds a lot more "hot" than picture in your mind"? They might continue by saying "who says you can't use the same word twice in the same sentence? We don't want to paint images of our products that are tight and rigid so we should not be worrying about sticking with the old rules of grammar. It is more exciting to bend and break the rules."
When it comes to the economy I don't agree that shoes become the key thing in a tight economy because everyone is looking down. But I do think that the poor economy over the past few years is one reason that we see poor grammar in advertisements and on company websites and news websites on the Internet. Many years ago a proof reader would have caught mistakes in grammar and corrected them. I think that there is less proof reading done today than there was in the past because of companies not wanting to make expenditures that are not necessary (the thinking being "don't hire a proof reader if you don't really need one"). The public has gotten accustomed to spelling and grammer mistakes and they have come to expect that. Due to this fact when new ads come out the ones who write the material do not worry about getting into trouble if the grammar is not correct. In fact, they might get in more trouble spending time proofreading an ad (and not using their time to start writing the next ad) than they would if they did not proofread it.
I've enjoyed following your blog. The writing is old-fashioed and "correct" while at the same time being "hot" from time to time.
Anonymous Reader
Dear Anonymous Reader:
Thank you for reading and commenting on my blog.
As you can probably tell by looking closely at my profile, I am a member of the group you define as being those "of us who are over 45." (Take a good look; all those gray hairs are natural – I don't pay to have them put in!)
I agree that "…imagine … imagine…" is a bad construction as it is redundant, but that isn't what I was taking objection to. I am not above being redundant and repetitive where there is a use or a purpose involved. (…even if that useful purpose is a lame attempt at humor.)
My objection to the ad was the mutually exclusivity between the admonition and its intended outcome. If I could "imagine a store with more shoes than I could imagine" then it wouldn't be a store with more shoes than I could imagine, it would, at very worst, be a store with as many shoes as I could imagine. No matter who inconceivably large that number might me, if I could imagine a store with that number of shoes, it would not be a shoe store with more shoes than I could imagine.
They may as well have told me to describe a picture that is indescribably beautiful, or to recite a poem which has yet to be composed. The instruction contains the seeds of its own downfall.
The whole thing about the Shoe Event Horizon was just an illustration that I can imagine an awfully large number of shoes. I do agree with your idea, however, that perhaps the number of mistakes (or at least ill-conceived) things we are seeing in ads these days may be by a drive to increase the output of the copywriters and proofreaders at the ad agencies.
Everybody these days is being pressed to be more productive and with fewer resources. You may be right that this contributes to some of the things that leave me scratching my head. Some of it, however, may be the people at the agencies trying to be cleaver. Other parts still may be just the language evolving. When I was in school, the "common knowledge" was that "irregardless" was not a word. There are an increasing number of dictionaries that include it.
Most of the references that I have checked that include it define it as meaning "regardless" or "notwithstanding" with a note to the affect that many consider the word to be nonstandard. Most go further to explain the derivation as being a combination of such words as irrespective, irrelevant, and irreparable but I have no personal feelings for the word one way or the other. I don't use it but it no longer makes me cringe.
Thanks again for reading and commenting!
Don
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