Say it like you mean it.

There was an interesting anomaly in a recent obituary section of the newspaper: None of the dozens of people listed had actually died.  They "departed this life" or "left us," "went to be with the Lord" or otherwise euphemistically shuffled off this mortal coil.

Two of the most famous automobile ads of all time.  Because of two of the most famous headlines of all time. Click to enlarge

Last week the Secretary of the Army "resigned." The resignation came immediately after his boss told him that his services were no longer required. But he wasn't fired. Companies are "right sized," they don't cut staff. Executives "pursue other interests" they don't look for work. Cars are "pre-owned," not used.

The tendency to drape verbal doilies over clear, straightforward English may stem from prissy pseudo propriety, as if a circumlocution is somehow more genteel than a simple statement of fact. Or it may be an attempt to temper reality. After all, maybe a person isn't really dead if she or he has simply "gone home." And the trashed Taurus dumped by a rental fleet isn't really a piece of junk if it's a "program car."

Hogwash!

English is one of the richest languages on Earth. It is thunderously powerful and wonderously subtle.  Its approximately 990,000 words dwarf the 100,000 or so of French or the approximately 50,000 that can be written in Chinese (the spoken Chinese languages have more than that, but they're impossible to count, since as a practical necessity, vocabulary lists must be written down.) 

Surprisingly, the tendency to mealy-mouthed euphemisms sometimes creeps into marketing communications. Granted that no target audience (or copywriter, for that matter) knows all 990,000 English-language words. Or even the 24,000 different words in the works of Shakespeare or the 12,143 in the King James version of the Bible. But the 1,000 most-frequently used ones will usually do quite nicely.

If you are a client and find yourself saying "Isn't that a bit strong?" consider that "strong" is just what your advertisement should be. If you're a creative director and you are about to smooth off the rough edges of a piece of copy, stop. Make sure "polishing" isn't eviscerating. If you're a copywriter and you're tempted to do a genteel ad, it had better be for broaches or tea services.

For power, strong, plain Anglo-Saxon-root words and short, simple declarative sentences work.

For subtlety, the Latin-root words that visited England with the Roman occupation and came to stay with the Norman conquest in 1066 are ideal. And the sentence and paragraph architecture can be more complex.

Two classic automotive headlines illustrate the difference interestingly.

"Think small." for Volkswagen. A simple, straightforward – non subtle, Anglo-Saxon-rooted two word head for a pretty simple proposition: a sensible car because it wasn't a land barge.

"At sixty miles per hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock." Although "loudest," "noise," and "comes" are from the Anglo-Saxon, all of the rest that matters is Latin-root. The sentence is longer and the structure, with its dependent clause, is more complex. An appropriate headline for a more subtle sale.

Commercial speech (what you and we do) should say what it means in language appropriate to the media without beating around the bush. Being careful, of course, not to "misspeak."

 comment I back to top I archive I home