Writer's Block, Feature, "Waaaaasssssuuup" with Advertising?

When it comes to ad copy that "breaks the rules," grammarians and linguists don’t speak the same language.

On a typical day, a Canadian is exposed to between 3,000 and 5,000 advertisements. Text, images, and layout — all carefully designed to get people’s attention.

Maybe ad execs have been reading their dictionaries. The word "advertise" comes from the root advertere, the Latin word meaning "to turn towards," so the etymology of the word suggests a directing of one’s attention.

But in the chaos of conflicting messages — buy this, stop that, believe in this, don’t do that — how can attention be focused? The quandary has put the effectiveness of ads into question. In response, the advertising industry is moving toward an emphasis on "creativity." So now it is about "the art," which often means ignoring or breaking conventions. The idea is to be different and get noticed.

One way to do that is through language. In 2000, the Budweiser "Whassup?" campaign generated the most attention ever, and won more awards — including The Grand Prix for TV and Cinema at Cannes — than any other advertising program in history. In the following year came "What are you doing?" — a supposed yuppie spoof of the "Whassup?" campaign. Budweiser won a Bronze Lion at Cannes, while the VP for Marketing was named Advertiser of the Year. Budweiser was able to capture all this attention by playing with grammar.

Now That They Have Our Attention …

Okay, we’re looking, reading, watching, waiting — so what do these ad execs want? Ultimately, the company or organization paying the advertiser wants a person to translate that attention into something more tangible: some immediate action or some favourable disposition that will lead to some future action. The advertiser can make that happen by getting people to "turn toward" the ad so that they register its communication.

In The Language of Advertising, Angela Goddard describes the study of advertising copy as discourse — a system of language whereby readers have a "fleeting conversation" with writers of the text. But advertisers hope the conversation doesn’t stop there. They want the ad to be talked about and keep being talked about.

Even the name for the text of an ad — copy — connotes replication and reproduction. And since ads also have to compete with each other, the sheer number of a species can serve to help its survival: more of a particular ad means more opportunity to gain people’s attention, be talked about, and reproduce, which means even more opportunity to gain people’s attention … and so it goes.

But ads operate within narrow limits on the time and space to do all this. Such constraints favour ad copy that mimics spoken language: sentence fragments, colloquialisms, and other verbal shortcuts.

For example, the "Be Cointreauversial" campaign promoted the orange-flavoured alcohol by creating a new word and thus breaking the "use accepted vocabulary" rule. The reader could relate the freshly coined term to an existing word, and thereby derive meaning.

Another common device used in ad copy (as well as in literary prose) is to jump into a sequence in mid-action. That way, readers feel they are chance observers of something that is already occurring. Text built in such a way acquires an independent existence and assumes the status of "reality." It creates a need in the reader/audience to catch up and be informed.

For example, a Volkswagon ad stated, "Somewhere between tuxedo and birthday suit." This sentence fragment slogan does not specifically state the product, and so feels incomplete. This invites the reader to reconstruct the thought and thereby participate in the ad.

It has not always been this complicated. Language history buff Bill Bryson reminds us that "advertising" was originally more a matter of broadcasting or disseminating news. By the early 1800s, the term advertising had come to include the idea of spreading news of the availability of goods or services. The phenomenon of advertising as a tool of persuasion is a more recent product of the modern day.

Other "Cointreauversial" Examples

In the manner of "be careful what you wish for," some ad campaigns get more attention than they intend. Consider these cases, which provoked widespread response from grammar-concerned citizens:

"Treat yourself well. Everyday." for Coca-Cola’s Dasani mineral water.
After much consideration, the company claims it decided to go with the adjective option everyday rather than the adjective plus noun composition every day. See the July 2003 edition of Harper’s magazine for a hilarious letter exchange.

"Toyota. Everyday."
Same grammar rebellion as above. The company claimed its word usage was deliberate and the two-word every day looked awkward with the space in the middle.

Apple Computer’s "Think different" campaign.
Again, the company defended its choice, saying that differently would tell a person how to think. They wanted to suggest different as the thing to think about.

"Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should."
For using like rather than as, this cigarette slogan is perhaps the most commonly cited example of a grammar goof in advertising. The debate spurred spin-off commercials, in which a "Mrs. Grundy" observed that like is not a conjunction. Her remark was met with, "What do you want, good grammar or good taste?"

Nine out of Ten Grammarians Agree …

These ads all contain deviations from the standards of prescriptive, or normative, grammar. Prescriptive grammar provides guidelines for how one "ought" to speak, and its prescription is simple: good grammar means obeying rules. Do not end a sentence with a preposition, use the proper case of pronoun — we are taught these prescriptive grammar rules in school and read about them in style guides.

Yet these same rules, so carefully recited by teachers and delineated in manuals, are broken every day by advertisers. They may be catching our attention, but grammarians say poor grammar in ads is a corruption of the language and teaches children the improper use of words. Also, the prevalence of English globally is due in part to advertising, so these grammar errors will be the first contact that many non-English speakers have with the language.

Grammar classic The Elements of Style warns of the negative effects. The language of advertising, say Strunk and White, "profoundly influences the tongues and pens of children and adults," with its "deliberate infractions of grammatical rules and its crossbreeding of the parts of speech." The authors venture that people will want to try writing that way, but admonish, "You do so at your own peril, for it is the language of mutilation." They add "[T]he young writer had best not adopt the device of mutilation in ordinary composition, whose purpose is to engage, not paralyze, the reader’s senses."

In general, the argument goes something like this: when a word is seen correctly written and in its proper context, it helps to strengthen a child’s habit of recognition. (Indeed, parents and teachers can cite many examples of how more reading translates into better spelling. Children who read a lot see the proper spelling of words and it sticks.) On the other hand, certain cultural influences, such as advertisements, do not reinforce and, in fact, contradict the instruction a child receives in school.

This argument is posed by grammarians, but the phenomenon of rule breaking in popular media is not unique to language. A child watching Roadrunner outwit the Coyote is exposed to all sorts of physical law violations. In that sense, the cartoon certainly does not reinforce "correct" physics, and contradicts the principles that children learn in science class.

… But Do They Know Anything about Grammar?

In The Language Instinct, Montréal-born Steven Pinker, Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, argues that the words "rules," "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" have very different meanings, depending on your interest in language. To the scientist or linguist these terms are descriptive; to the layperson or grammarian, they are prescriptive.

Pinker uses an analogy to illustrate. A taxi can obey the laws of physics, while breaking the laws of Saskatchewan. Similarly, a person can speak grammatically (in the systematic sense) while also speaking ungrammatically (in the non-prescriptive sense). For example, as children learn language they make all sorts of grammatical errors by breaking conventions of adult language. Yet a child’s utterances do have structure, say linguists, and this early grammar gradually develops into adult grammar.

Likewise, ad copy is not just a random jumble of words. Advertisements may break prescriptive norms, but ads have a grammatical structure that makes them intelligible. Pinker observes that most disputes about "correct" grammar are not about grammatical logic, but questions of custom and authority. It’s not that advertisers are using "bad grammar," it’s just non-standard for written English.

Pinker, who Publisher’s Weekly called "language’s bad boy," derides grammarians for their obsession for the conventional. "When a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations," he says. Imagine listening to the complex song of the humpback whale and declaring that you noticed an error! He muses, isn’t the song of the humpback whale whatever the whale decides to sing?

Groovy Baby! Language Is a Lava Lamp

Journalist and American social critic H. L. Mencken saw language as "a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die." Language is indeed alive, say linguists. It will change inevitably.

"The use of the language determines the grammar. If usage changes, the rules change," says Anthea Fraser Gupta, a linguist at the University of Leeds, England. It seems that some grammarians are trying to resist such change. For instance, convention today says never split an infinitive, yet this is a throwback to the Latin roots of English. In Latin, it is impossible to split infinitives because an infinitive is a single word.

In The Power of Babel, John McWhorter identifies five processes of change in language. One of them is grammar: patterns of grammar that occur occasionally are generalized into rules. For example, English began like Latin with many endings to indicate plural, depending on the class of the noun. Now the ending "–s" (or "–es") is favoured. (Although, as with any rule in English, there are many exceptions.)

McWhorter emphasizes that while culture may appear central to the process, language change is not collapsible into the larger category of cultural change. For example, he observes, there is nothing inherently French about taking a beverage (je prends une biere) instead of drinking it. And there is nothing inherently English about "taking" a nap, while French "make" one (faire un petit somme). Most aspects of speech, says McWhorter, are not determined by culture, but by "the cumulative effect of countless millennia of transformation proceeding through structured chaos." In this way, he envisions language as a lava lamp.

Going with the Flow of Language

More precisely, in a recent article in Nature (27 September 2001), researchers noted that human language has a unique combination of characteristics.

In other words, human language combines aspects of primate and mathematical language. Our words have meaning, we use them according to a system of rules, but the system has the structural resources for indefinite recombination. That means language is open enough to allow for creativity and change. These qualities of human language distinguish us from the ape and the machine.

It would seem that part of the joy of being human is to have this kind of freedom in the way we communicate — and grammar allows for it. Karen-Elizabeth Gordon says it well in the foreword to Sin & Syntax:

They Doth Protest Too Much

To summarize the value of grammar: we need it to be understood. When communicating with language, thoughts are formed into certain orders to be intelligible. Grammar provides a set of rules to do just that. On this point grammarians and linguists agree.

But many champions of prescriptive grammar go one step farther, and are concerned about maintaining the purity of the language. They want to protect a body of clearly defined rules and try to entice others to follow the rules for the good of the language. How far will they go? Taken to the extreme, adherence to prescriptive grammar comes to the issue of censorship. If books are banned for their "harmful" effects on society, might it be good to stop children from reading Huckleberry Finn, so they don’t pollute the acquisition of proper language with a dialect that disregards standard English conventions?

In the preface to an English dictionary in 1755, Dr. Samuel Johnson characterized the desire to keep the language static and pure. He said a lexicographer who imagines his dictionary can embalm the language, and thus preserve words and phrases from mutability, is like a man seeking an elixir to extend life unnaturally.

But unlike the life and death hi-jinx of the Roadrunner and Coyote, prescriptive grammar seems to be no laughing matter. A survey of the language reference section in a bookstore betrays a certain level of anxiety. Titles include Painless Grammar, Woe Is I: A Grammarphobe’s Guide, and the particularly colourful, Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, which amazon.com claims can help you "exorcise" your "grammatical demons." With all these references to suffering and phobia — even blood-sucking damnation — a person might wonder: does attention to grammatical principles actually relieve angst or produce more of it?

One thing is certain — attention to grammatical principles can be shrewdly channelled for economic gain. The grammarians decrying advertisers for breaking language rules may not be disinterested parties. Many have a stake in our believing that the erosion of grammar indicates a decline in society. Creating the perception of a "problem," and offering a ready solution (buy their grammar guides) is a standard marketing scheme.

What about Canadian Grammar, Eh?

There is no distinctive Canadian grammar, in relation to Britain or the US. That’s according to The Story of English, which tracks the evolution of the English language around the globe. Of course, differences exist among these three systems of English, but mainly in vocabulary and pronunciation. Canada is often characterized as being the linguistic middle ground — and sometimes we see the literal confluence of British and American English in our spelling: a Canadian company advertising to fix the flat on your car might call itself a Tire (US) Centre (UK).