Benefits of DTC advertising

This was taken in the men's room of the South Street Diner.

Too many marketing diacritics

You know I like gratuitous umlauts. But this goes too far.
The award for cramming as many weird symbols into a product name as possible goes to J/Ā/S/Ö/N brand natural products.

It hits the jackpot with both umlauts and a macron and doesn't rest there but adds slashes too. That is cool.

Discussions of gratuitous umlauts/macrons at Language Log:
Weird Tradename Umlaut
Modish Macron
Heavy Metal Umlaut

I'm surprised he's surprised

Mark Liberman at Language Log is surprised that a writer might not be good at math.

I gather from this that there are educated, intelligent and otherwise skilled adults who are not sure how to turn two numbers into a percentage change, and that some of them are working as public relations professionals. I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm just truly and sincerely surprised.

Let's see if I can help Mark understand. First, in my experience most writers in PR, advertising, or communications have humanities educations. Remember back in college there were all those people taking English courses and their parents would say, "What are you going to do with that?" Well, that's what they're doing with that. And second, if the last time you were asked to figure out a percentage change was 20 years ago, when you were more focused on the cute potential mate in the seat across the way, you might be a little rusty.

[Update: I'm SOOOO misunderstood (see Mark's update to his OP). I don't blame Mark--I wasn't feeling very verbose yesterday. By pointing out that most writers are have humanities education, I didn't mean to dump on English majors. I have a degree in English. I meant actually, to poke a little fun at Mark's intellectual snobbery. First of all, most writers have a different specialization than scientists. And second, they really don't want to be doing their jobs. The joke in advertising is that they are all frustrated novelists.

As for this:

But, but, percentages are taught in the 5th grade

c'mon, how much does anybody remember from 5th grade? And to the previous point, it's not like writers are doing math every day (figuring tips is easily fudged).

As for Holly Cordner's claim

If you can’t even do elementary math, how did you get through your formal education? How did you get a college degree?

I'd say pretty easily, I don't know about her school, but Temple only required a "Math for Humanities" course that was pretty pathetic. Anyway, it's really besides the point. English majors spend a lot of time learning about other things. Their expertise is elsewhere. They don't need to double major in math.]

Ad syntax

Continuing the ad theme here. There's an airline ad I walked by this morning in the 33rd street PATH station that gave me a momentary pause.

The copy read (with approximation to font sizes and line breaks):

We know

How you fly

to LA is as important as when you fly.

This one sent me down the garden path. My first reaction was "They know how I fly, ok." Then I got to the "to LA..." part and was like, "huh?" Had to do some retracing of my steps there.

Clearly there is a need for linguistically-trained professionals in the advertising field. I think I'll go ask for a raise.

Copywriters vs. linguists!

As a former linguist turned copywriter, I find myself in the odd position of defending my current profession against my former. Mark Liberman over at Language Log takes some copywriters to task for mispelling violà voilà. To be fair, Mark is not just ragging on copywriters, but the whole ad industry--writers, editors, clients.

But if I were spending $100,000 to put a full-page ad onto the back page of the New Yorker, with 26 total words of copy, I think I could manage to check the spelling.

Having now been on the inside of an agency, I can tell you how this went down. The copywriter most likely made a mistake and wrote violá voilá in the manuscript. Then the sharp-eyed editor noticed the problem and changed it to violà voilà. All was fine until it went to the client for review. The client remembered back to her highschool French and changed it back to violá voilá. The editor at the agency flew into a rage. The account person asked if the client is right. The editor composed a heated email explaining the problem, complete with scanned dictionary and style book pages. The account person gently tried to explain the problem to the client. By this time the client had found a few colleagues to back her up. The writer, exhausted from coming up with 50 different concepts to sell cheap wine, ignored the whole thing. At some point after that, the account person uttered the phrase, "We're not going to die on our sword for this." And so it went to print.

So don't hate us Mark. We're only human.