Weird English Advertising

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Now having TV access for the first time in years, I'm noticing an odd new trend in advertising... or, at least it seems to be a trend. For instance, there is some bladder control ad featuring animated women made of plumbing fixtures, in which the following two sentences occur:

"I have better things to do than only go to the bathroom."

"You have better things to join than always a line for the bathroom."

Now, it's one thing for an ad to be ungrammatical in a homey sort of way, to get in touch with the common Joe, e.g., "I ain't got no time for none of that."

But the two sentences quoted above are not constructed the way any native English speaker would speak in the placement of "always" and "only." (Although if ads like this keep running I assume that soon native English speakers will begin speaking like this.) Now the copywriters had to have know that they were writing very weirdly, so that means it was a strategic move... so what is the strategy?

Comments

  1. Crosbie2:47 AM

    Bypassing the critical and analytical left brain by scrambling the grammar?

    ReplyDelete

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