What I’m thinking about this morning:
1.The new anti-gun ad, featuring George Zimmerman…kind of.
2.Lazy adjectives
3.I’m stufed…or am I?
1. Have you heard about or seen the new anti-stand-your-ground ad from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (a non-profit)? It features George Zimmerman’s actual call to police as well as a neighbor’s 911 call.
The ad also features a partial re-enactment and bodies laying on the ground dressed in hoodies. The ad gets its point across. And it has people talking. So is it a success? Is it too much, too far? Is the use of the actual calls a little extreme?
Personally I feel the spot is a success because it’s trying to get you to do one thing: think. You may think it’s stupid and completely disagree with it. You may think it makes a lot of sense and want to go sign the online petition. But you’re thinking about it.
Some people I’ve spoken too have raised the point that this may be too close to the Zimmerman trial – too soon, they say. People have seen the images, heard the calls; just experienced a little fatigue with the case in general. From a marketing standpoint you want to strike while the iron is hot. This is a scene, these are statements that are fresh in people’s minds.
But from a personal standpoint, regardless of where you come down on it this was still a tragic event that maybe we can learn from. Someone interpreted a legal action in a way that ended in the death of another person. I think that’s worth the time to explore and think about. If that was my kid I wouldn’t want anyone forgetting this any time soon.
2. Every time I hear a server say the specials I think of that scene from Dumb and Dumber where Lloyd Christmas asks ‘what’s the soup du jour’. When he found out it was the soup of the day he said ‘Mmmmm…I’ll have that.’
I feel the same way sometimes. I have no idea what the special is or half of the ingredients or adjectives the server seems to think will impress me. Well last week, while hearing about a ‘rustic tomato soup’ I decided to ask—what does rustic mean?
My boss told me to stop being annoying but the server said ‘no, that’s ok…we’ve had five other people ask already.’ She explained that rustic just meant it was more of a hardy soup, like a stew or chowder. So..more stuff in it. (I passed. Hey, it was 80 degrees out.) Two minutes later I overhear her telling another table the special. And guess what they asked? You guessed it – what’s rustic mean?
According to the dictionary rustic means ‘of, relating to or suitable for the country or country people.’ I don’t know what that means either but it sure doesn’t sound like the definition I received for the soup du jour. So I Googled ‘rustic foods’ – according to Yahoo Answers it means a ‘rural or hearty’ dish. Ok, getting closer, kind of.
Two days later I’m at dinner. I open up my menu and see that the restaurant offers a ‘rustic Italian flat bread’. Which gives me the idea for this blog post – are there words that we just rely on because they sound good? Are we getting lazy with our adjectives? I think there are some words that we have just come to accept as they trigger a ‘oh, that sounds good…I’ll have that’. I think we could come up with a good list of these words.
3. I’m stufed…or am I? Now, where were math lessons like this when I was in school? A Queensbury N.Y. math teacher charged his students with discovering if a Double Stuf Oreo really was. Turns out…they’re not! They only have 1.86 times the crème. Leading me to ask—how is this the first time someone’s thought to do this experiment?? They made their debut in 1975 and we made it allll the way to 2013 before someone thought to test for this? I see a class action lawsuit coming on.
Of course Oreo claims that’s not true and there are indeed ‘double’ the ingredients. Personally I think this is a huge marketing opportunity for Oreo, and knowing how great they are at real-time marketing I’m sure they have something up their sleeve.
Look on the bright side – you can eat more of them now!
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Lukas
Regarding the point about "rustic", I think there is a dual answer. First of all, a rustic Italian bread is probably based on a recipe that came from a rustic, country local once upon a time... Somewhere out in Tuscany, for example. And the rustic tomato soup could be the same thing, but I sort of doubt it. I think the fact is that people ARE lazy with adjectives, whether it be colloquially or in marketing/branding. I look back at literature from 100 years ago and people were so much more descriptive and diverse in the way they portrayed the world around them, and I believe that we are, in general, lazy with our vocabulary compared to how things once were. "Rustic" probably sounded sophisticated to someone, so they stuck it on what sounds like a tomato bisque. It is wrong to do so? No, but it seems a bit phony to you and a lot of people. I think we need to be careful both to use more diverse adjectives, but to do so responsibly, and not just because it sounds fancy.