Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 10/02/2010 2:02:57 PM PDT by firebrand
Forgive me for the vanity, but I have been watching a lot of TV for the first time in many years, and I can't help noticing how the grammar standards have fallen.
Back in the fifties, the slogan "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" was widely criticized for helping to abet the breakdown of the like/as distinction. "Like" used to apply to nouns, and "as" to verbs. I quit worrying about that one several years ago, long after everyone else did.
But I promise never to abandon the dangling modifier and the unparallel sentence. A dangling modifier does not have to be a participle. It can be any descriptive introductory phrase that does not modify the noun or pronoun that follows it.
Lack of parallel in a sentence is possibly the most common fault of mediocre writers. It occurs most often when a few nouns or adjectives are joined by a conjunction with a verb phrase, or predicate. The late William Safire aptly described these sentences as "not lying flat."
Here are some you might have heard lately, minus the sponsor's name, to minimize embarrassment.
After being diagnosed, my doctors recommended a . . .
As a manager, my team . . .
As kids, I always looked up to you. [This one also has a "not only" that is followed by "but" instead of the correct "but also."]
My job is to listen to the ____s, _____s, hotel, and restaurant workers.
Tell your doctor if you have ____, ____, and any other medications you are taking.
. . . whether you're going to Kennedy, Newark, or riding around town.
It's quick, affordable, and takes only about an hour.
It's compact, portable, and stores easily.
It's ____, roomy, and gets . . .
Gold is easy to buy, easy to sell, it has never been worth zero, and the timing has never been better. [In this case, two adjective phrases and two clauses.]
Women who are pregnant, nursing, or may become pregnant.
You would think with all the millions that are spent on airtime, the industry could hire a few copyeditors. But maybe they are just trying to get people to make remarks about the bad grammar and thus remember the product, like a good consumer should.
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What drives me crazy is the over-use of the word “REAL”, in ad copy; especially the tired palilogy of “Real this. Real That. Real tiresome”. So called “Creatives” and Marketing Directors have been selling this one to their clients since 1994 - and it’s still being used today as if it’s actually unique and persuasive. Millions of unemployed, yet there are thousands in this industry who get paid for recycling each other’s crapola.
Betty Furness, a former NYC consumer affairs person, used to point out that anything with a "-y" on the end of it signals an imitation--legally. In other words, if the sponsor says "buttery" it has no butter, "chocolatey" and it has no chocolate, "nutty" and it has no nuts.
A philosophy professor once commented on the overuse of "real" as an indication the missing sense of reality in our lives.
I have long noted that local radio advertisers ALL exhibit speech defects of one sort or another as well as being grammatically incompetent. The national advertisers mostly are just grammatically obtuse. My favorite is several ads for a chiropractic clinic. They are spoken by a female or a male voice and both have a severe problem with S. All their S sounds are exaggerated, some to an extreme. He sounds as if he is trying to get over an inability to make the sound at all. I called a health food place because the use of “for” instead of “of” reversed the meaning of what the fellow was trying to say. I was gratified that the next time I heard the ad, it had been fixed. That speaker was an immigrant, though, and actually interested in getting it right.
Then there is the Culligan Water Treatment ad. The lady says that since her water filter was installed, “I don’t have that smell, anymore...” The implied claim is interesting.
A speech defect can indicate that the person went to a private or parochial school. The public schools have speech therapists who go around and listen to every kid talk.
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Outsourcing.
“Hello my name, is Bob. Pleasing you, to buy this yes”.
You just know, that’s what that “Peggy” credit card commercial is trying to say, but cannot. :)
I’ve seen a few subtle tea party plugs in commercials but will not tell which ones lest the FEC decide to get after them.
Speech defects in the local private schools(they are all parochial) are taken care of by the teachers who tell the parents that the lisp needs to be fixed and here is a list of (private) therapists. A friend's little boy had an overlarge tongue and attendant speech and drool problems that mama had just lived with. She didn't even notice the speech problems because she had come to talk to him with the same "accent." The teacher told her he would have to get therapy or he would never graduate first grade. She took the boy for two therapy sessions which distressed him mightily. He asked mama how he could avoid going back. She told him he had to learn to talk as other children talk. He went into intensive self therapy, listening to a child's record that his dad said was in good English, and practicing controlling his tongue in front of a mirror. NASA noticed the boy in high school and paid for his undergraduate years at the university. They hired him then and expedited his progress to his doctorate in physics. Now they are putting him through for a second doctorate. His parents are high IQ but nothing approaching their son.
Good story.
This card was handed to me by Tomas Gomez himself.
Even the Spanish has a mistake!
To paraphase a popular song:
“Life in the fast lane, surely make you loose your mind.”
I gave up bitching about the misuse of grammar and words when I saw an editorial in the Houston Chronicle that mistakenly transposed ‘loose’ for ‘lose”.
You see it all the time, and it galls me.
Sometimes this is the colloquial use of the word “real” to mean “very.” In rare instances, it’s used to distinguish an ingredient from an imitation, as in “real chocolate.”
Betty Furness, a former NYC consumer affairs person, used to point out that anything with a “-y” on the end of it signals an imitation—legally. In other words, if the sponsor says “buttery” it has no butter, “chocolatey” and it has no chocolate, “nutty” and it has no nuts.
A philosophy professor once commented on the overuse of “real” as an indication the missing sense of reality in our lives.
I’d be curious what your background is. Are you in advertising? Irrespectively, I didn’t mean any disrespect to the industry (of which I share as a tv spot producer). Many of the Creatives are doing brilliant, effective work.
I tend to agree with the professor you sited.
Also, as I type this, I’m sitting in a restaurant in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. On their menu is the quote “Where friends meet their friends to unwind.” Somehow, I thought you might like that one! Best, Billy
If one has ever taken the ferry from Prince Rupert along the land passage into Alaska, one knows how boring such a ride can be if the weather closes in and the spectacular scenery disappears into the fog. In desperation I turned to Fowlers "English Usage" and proceeded to read passages to trapped passengers in the dining hall. I almost went swimming and those waters are very, very cold.
In the introduction to the volume, the editors reported that Winston Churchill, in the midst of the Battle of Britain, took time to make a notation in the margin of a document correcting the author's grammar and advising him that he would not have made such an error, "if you had read your Fowlers today."
I actually learned most of my English grammar by studying German long after English and Spanish courses in high school and Spanish and English courses in college. However, my favorite treatise on grammar was written by Mark Twain during his first European excursion titled, "That Awful German Language" which I found much more amusing than, "Eats, Shoots And Leaves."
A wonderful, creative bunch that were a laugh a minute and had a refreshing cynical attitude about their work. I still see the talent on TV and say hi to my old friends in my imagination.
He is also great on pretension. If you're going to use a foreign language, get it right, for instance, and it's better to repeat a word than to change "the bear" to "the woolly orsine" just for the sake of what he snidely calls "elegant variation."
He's a commonsense teacher and a great observer of the language in use. I can see why you wanted to read parts of it to others.
Interesting story. A blessing for those of us who went through speech therapy!
Although, I’m not as good as I ought to be, people usually pick up on it when they are in the know.
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