Colin McKay over at Canuckflack continues meeting the high expectations we all have for his blogging output. This post, Marketing Tagline for Morons, puts an example of useless and confusing marketing rhetoric under the microscope and finds substance severely lacking.
Cribbed from Colin’s post:
“If electromagnetic waves can penetrate walls, imagine what they can do to your skin”
- spotted at a Clarins makeup counter at Macy’s
Umm – the same thing they do to walls – nothing?
What really got me about this was I had put my friends through a rant on the very same subject over the weekend. We were playing poker & using a set of corporate-sponsored cards. The cards were emblazoned with the company’s slogan: Delivering Sustainable Value.
That’s it. Oh, there was a logo & website URL as well. I naturally don’t remember what the URL is and have only a vague recollection of the company name. I’d imagine that recall (or lack thereof) is pretty common. The thing that stood out for me was the tagline. That may even have been what was intended.
The problem? The tagline is totally meaningless. How do they deliver value? Who judges it to be sustainable? Who is this valuable to or how does one determine its value? I can’t answer any of those questions…and if I can’t you haven’t told me anything. You’ve just assaulted me with utter drivel.
Bad Marketer. Bad.
Tags: Canuckflack, jargonism, promotion, taglines, marketing
Categories: Hyperbole · Spin
From American Heritage, a new book 100 Words Every High School Student Should Know.
According to the promotional copy:
"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."
I’m pleased that I know most of them. Though I would use only a fraction in my day to day vocabulary.
Also, I think the key word in the title is SHOULD. I’m sure testing a random sampling of people on the streets of any western, English-speaking, city would be discouraging if we used this list as a benchmark.
Update: A hat-tip to the good folk over at the CommonCraft blog for the link.
Tags: vocabulary, 100 words, American Heritage
Categories: Comprehension · Vocabulary
Hat-tip to Matthew Ingram for pointing out the Best.Obituary.Ever.
Obituaries, unlike eulogies, aren’t bound to the convention of presenting the deceased in the best possible light. In fact, good ones are highly accurate accounts of an individual’s life & impact – whatever it may be. However, it’s still common for them to paint a favourable portrait as the person writing them is often intimately acquainted with the person (friend, family, etc..).
So what to make of one that starts:
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
and ends:
He never married.
You can find the full obituary here. It’s definitely worth reading.
Tags: obituary, telegraph, bismarck, honesty
Categories: Candor or Truthiness · Plain Language
Over the weekend I was watching the news on Radio-Canada as part of my ongoing struggle to gain some mastery of French. One of the main stories was the meeting of Presidents Bush and Putin at Dubya’s Kennebunkport estate.
This item was also featured on the scrolling news ticker found at the bottom of the screen. While reading this I was struck by the spelling of Putin’s name on the scrolling ticker….instead of spelling his name P-U-T-I-N, the ticker read "Bush et P-O-U-T-I-N-E…"
For those who don’t know, poutine is a delicious French-Canadian dish made up of French fries, gravy and cheese curds. This alone is funny. At first I thought it was merely a pronunciation/translation gaffe. But I was nearly on the floor laughing when my French-Canadian girlfriend told me that "p-u-t-i-n" is a French word for a prostitute. Of course, this makes the phrase "Bush et Putin recontrent" (or Bush and Putin meet) even more amusing. Especially when one considers how Putin – one of the world’s most powerful men, an ex-KGB boss and by all accounts a hard-nosed bastard – would react given the choice between being called a whore or a fast-food item.
A brief Technorati search suggests that "poutine" is the preferred Francophone spelling of Mr. Putin’s name. I can only imagine that is because using ‘putin’ would be indecent. It’s been my experience that people’s surnames remain intact when being conveyed in a foreign language…Presidente Bush, Monsiuer Dunn, etc…
This does remind though of the highly amusing instances where a person/culture’s grasp of English leads to inappropriate signs rife with double-entendres. But at least those cases could be prevented with this handy sign-translating gadget.
Tags: bush, putin, poutine, translation, double-entendre, jargonism
Categories: Double-entendre · Interpretation · Political Life
