I admit it freely. I am a Word Nerd. I love words. I love their proper use, I love puzzles that involve words from crosswords to Boggle, and I love clever and creative uses of the English language, whether in movies or even in TV commercials. I even have a favorite word for an incredibly nerdy reason.*
But I also find a lot of commercials, especially these days, using words very badly. From super-vagueness to easily disprovable claims to reassurances that aren't that reassuring, commercials really bother me. I recently had to switch from NPR for moral reasons to a commercial radio station, so I've been hearing a lot more commercials.
How does this lead me to believe that Rachel could be a vampire? I'll get to that, but let me give you one example of an extraordinarily bad local commercial slogan.
I live in a college town. Of course, one thing we don't lack are pizza delivery places or ads for the same. One ad caught my eye in the paper because its slogan was "Let us knock on your door with fresh hot pizza!"
As my written humor idol, Dave Barry, always says, I am not making this up. So, of course the first thing I thought was, "Ew. Who would want to eat a pizza after you knocked on a door with it?" Then I also found two other problems with this ad slogan. First of all, if they knock with pizza, how would you know they were there? Pizza isn't exactly loud. Are they advertising that they aren't really interested in getting your attention, but just in vandalism? Second, why do they want to get hot cheesy grease and tomato sauce all over your door? So I put two and two together and realized that they aren't really a pizza delivery place. They must be burglars. Think about it. They grease up your door with pizza, make sure they can't get your attention, and then slide through the grease into your home and take your Ipod (or whatever).
So let's turn to a more popular commercial, at least on my local Air America affiliate. Has anyone else noticed how many commercials are running that either want to buy your gold (as if you have any) or sell you gold (as if you have money for it)? It's as if companies are convinced that despite the recession, we're either hiding gold under the mattress or hiding spare money there to waste on expensive precious metals. Right.
The Air America commercial is from some company that thinks you have extra money to waste on gold. But one of the things they say really bothers me. They say that, and I quote, "gold alone is real money."
Oh? Really? I'd like everyone out there to do a little experiment. Go to your local grocery store the next time you need food, and try paying them with your gold watch or your wedding ring or whatever else you have that's made of gold, and see if they'll take that rather than the "real money" of your country of residence's currency. I'll bet you dollars (or pounds, euros, pesos) to doughnuts the cashier will look at you with tired, bloodshot eyes, and ask you to stop joking and pay the "real money" of currency or credit/debit.
Yeah. Gold alone is real money. And bicycles alone are real SUVs. Trust me. Just send $9.95 plus shipping and handling to...
Sorry. I used to make up my own commercials for products I was using in front of our bathroom mirror as a kid and I got a little carried away.
Here's one more that I think everyone probably hates...one of those damned fake Viagra commercials for a product called Extenze. Their commercials are so very annoying that I will actually deliberately mute them and look away from the TV screen when they come on. First of all, they refuse to call it like it is and refer to their product as "male enhancement." That's ridiculous on its face. Does that mean that, say, a nerdy man will spend even more time on his computer after taking their product? But they get even more ridiculous and say their product make a "certain part of the male body" larger. I don't know about you, but I know that male bodies have lots of parts, and most of them really shouldn't get larger. Can you imagine a man with flappy, huge ears? How about large, distorted eyes or with one pinky that's six feet long?
Call it what it is, for goodness' sake. If you mean the nose, say it. If you mean a penis, say it. It's not a dirty word, it's the anatomically correct reference. (And stop holding up the President's FCC commissioners so we can get some adults in there, please, rather than the old prudes there now.)
So to actually get to my point, Rachel Maddow said on her August 13th show that she reads ad copy for her radio program. I don't know how things are in your area, but I've found that she's right. She currently voices ads for two products on my local affiliate (at least - I don't listen all day every day), Angie's List, which appears to be a consumer review site of service companies, and "Dr. Perry's NightSkin," a wrinkle cream.
Of course, I find the latter most suspicious. First of all, even the name is evocative, isn't it? But of course, what really brought it to my attention was her use of the term "embarrassing signs of aging."
Embarrassing? How is it embarrassing to show signs of aging? Even rocks and trees show how old they are, and if you're freaking 83, how is it embarrassing to have wrinkles? Wouldn't it be more embarrassing NOT to have signs of aging, because it would either mean that you have way more money than sense and are keeping plastic surgeons way too busy or...hm. Hey, loyal reader? What humanoid beings don't show any signs of aging and are always trying to blend into human society?
No, not faeries. Are you kidding? We would so worship faeries, it's not even funny. But vampires, now, they have problems, don't they? So wouldn't it be in their best interests to try to keep humans dyeing their hair and desperately trying to stave off normal "signs of aging" so they could blend in?
Yup. That's why I think she must be a vampire. Don't bore me with your "but it was probably the best of the ads she had to choose from" or "but she's female in America and might have body image issues" reality-based critiques. Reality is way too boring, and in this case it's not even funny! She's clearly a vampire, or at least working for them, trying to help them blend in with the rest of us and improve our health care so that our blood will taste better.
Speaking of better tasting blood, I want to introduce you to my friend, Ima G. Nary, who has a farm not too far away, where she makes a tasty sausage named...
*So, that favorite word of mine? Facetiously. It contains all of the vowels in the English language, which is rare enough, but it also has them in the exact order in which they appear in the alphabet (a, then e, then i, etc.). I really love that word, and I think it's warming up to me, too.