Just a link today to this article that I wrote for the New York Times on the rhetoric of advertising slogans.
Be all you can be.
To be or not to be.
Et c.
Et c.
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I love your articles and blog posts. I regularly listen to a radio documentary on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation by advertising executive Terry O'Reilly (his older series was called "The Age of Persuasion" and his current one "Under the Influence") and he says that advertising people never use the word "slogan" - ever. They call them taglines, even though a tagline is defined as a "slogan" in most dictionaries. Curious how they avoid the term - I wonder why??
ReplyDeleteIn the article, you mention "Beanz Meanz Heinz" as an example of enallage, and say that "grammar would have insisted" that it should be "Beanz Mean Heinz." But I'd say it's really only the spelling that's unconventional here, not the subject–verb agreement. If we interpret "Beanz" as referring to the word beans, rather than to the legumes themselves, then it's perfectly appropriate to have singular agreement on the verb. (For example, we would say "Beans is the plural of bean," not "Beans are the plural of bean.")
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