Today's adverts, packages and slogans are designed to offer a lot without actually saying anything useful through clever use of words and wordings. This is typified by a recent Head and Shoulders advert, which claims to provide 'up to 100% flake-free hair'. Up to 100%? That only provides, ooh say, the entire spectrum of hair-flakiness as wiggle room. You could furnish a jar of marmalade with the same claim, and when hordes of the freshly orange-shred-coiffured start beating down your door asking for their money back, kindly point out that zero percent is still within the confines of 'up to a hundred'. (Actually, thinking about it, zero percent implies all flake and no hair, and if that is your starting point then I think you're past the point where a simple shampoo and condition may come to your rescue). Going even further, surely absolutely anything can be 'up to 100%' something with absolute authenticity? Did you know, for example, that I am up to 100% Swiss, Swedish, Portugese, American, Mongolian and Australian? Thought not.
(The 'up to' bit of the ad probably relates to this article I came across. Still it wouldn't hurt them to give us a bit more of a clue, would it?)
Tesco are known to sell their chicken produce with the phrase 'reared to Tesco's livestock standards' on the packet. Well thanks for that, but you stop woefully short of telling me what your standards actually are. For all I know, you could keep your chickens stuffed into a Mini Cooper, like the set up to some surreal Christmas cracker gag. 'Well', says the marketing guru, 'at least it's not a Honda Jazz. We have standards, you know'. (For the record, litigation fans, I know for a fact that Tesco do not keep their chickens in a Mini, or indeed any other city runaround).
Probably one of the more intricate offenders is Greggs the bakers, whose sandwiches are sold boxed with the slogan 'Freshly made with bread we baked' on the front. On the bottom of the box is a bolder statement, in that 'the bread...was freshly delivered straight from our local bakery where our bakers bake fresh bread everyday'. That (count them, folks) is three separate uses of the word 'fresh'. How fresh can you possibly be? The consumer is practically salivating at this stage at the thought of the freshness of the bread he is about to sink his teeth into. At no point, unfortunately, do they make the outright claim that the bread in your freshly-purchased (!) sandwich is that selfsame fresh bread.
Look closely; all they really say is that the sandwich was freshly made, i.e. that the constituent parts that make up the classic BLT were cobbled together in the shop that morning. The constant talk of freshness and the statement about baking fresh bread cause the buyer to make the mental junction between two actually unconnected statements. You see, they talk of making fresh bread daily and they talk of delivering bread today, but never state that they are talking about the same bit of bread, viz:
“Actually, that bread's been sitting around for a month in our bakery. But we delivered it to the shop this morning, so we haven't broken our promise!”
The ensuing misunderstanding is so hilarious that the writers of Frasier are forever kicking themselves that they never made an episode in a branch of Greggs, with the eponymous psychiatrist and his brother squabbling over which loaf to cut up for sandwiches, before Niles' wheat allergy kicks in and the audience goes into a fit of laughter.
So it's not the lies and liars you need to watch out for. It's really those who tell the truth, just not the truth you thought you were hearing - they need watching the most.
Please share any more examples!
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