This week: Advertising! We loves it! We hates it! It is preciouses to us. And then some interesting linguistics in the news stories plus all the footnotes you didn’t even know you wanted. Let’s get to it.
Advertising fascinates me. I remember being told, somewhere in my early school days, that words like "lite" and "nite" weren't actually correct English. They were made-up by advertisers. And for me, in those formative years, the idea that you could just...make up a new word? Gobsmacked. I went on to study advertising1 pretty heavily in university; I remained fascinated by the linguistic aspects2 of advertising even while growing steadily more horrified by industry practices.
For the next couple of weeks, I plan to talk about some of the words and language used in and around advertising, from a linguistic point of view, because...I'm not a fan, but yeah, I'm fascinated3. So, we're going to discuss things like, what's the difference between advertising and marketing, what makes something commercial, and why isn't propaganda considered advertising? Along the way we'll look at words like campaign, slogan, tagline, and other advertising jargon that gets bandied about in daily life.
But, to start, and before we get too deep into definitions and etymologies, let me throw out an idea I've been playing with - marketing is how we sell things but advertising is the language we use in doing so. What I mean by this is that marketing is usually centered around a campaign. This ensures that the message is consistent across all media and platforms, and that the brand builds recognition in predictable ways. The heart of any advertising campaign is the slogan. These are the words kids repeat on the playground4 and that adults wear emblazoned on T-shirts.
These taglines, slogans, and what-have-yous are designed to be memorable. They are studied and tested until the brand's message (buy this!) has been distilled into a pithy, concise, soundbite that can be spoken by actors for t.v. and audio but that reads equally well when printed on everything from billboards to banner ads. And so, again, I maintain that marketing is the way we sell it - magazines and flyers and t.v. commercials, oh my! - but advertising is the language we craft to put in the marketing.
I'm pretty happy with this definition although I will acknowledge, before the pedants5 come crawling out of their holes, that this is only part of the full definition of either word. As we know, the older the word, the more meanings and nuances it has acquired and both these words are relatively old6. Yeah. I think this is the definition I'm going to use for the next couple of essays to explore the words we use when we talk about advertising.
Stay curious,
J
Linguistics in the Newsistics:
The Fight to Save Hawaii Sign Language
I learned basic ASL when I was in elementary school. I had a friend who was hard-of-hearing. He had a hearing aid, but it sometimes helped if I signed the few words I knew. When I got into teaching, I found that teaching (hearing) kids a few signs would help them remember key concepts and words. While doing so, I discovered Japanese sign language. Much as studying the spoken language changed how I thought and how I viewed the world, studying the sign language opened up my brain to new ideas and new ways of thinking. These days, I follow a couple of sign-language tutors on Tik Tok, just to keep my hand in7. I'm also a huge supported of language preservation and revivification efforts. To that end, I want to draw people's attention to this CNN article about the struggle to record and revive Hawaiian Sign before it's too late. It's well worth reading, and, if you're looking for a cause to support, well, here's a good one.
Film Shot Entirely in Blackfoot Language
Sooyii is a new film that recently premiered at the Montana film festival. From the Missoulian:
Shot entirely on Blackfeet tribal land, the dialogue of "Sooyii" is delivered in the ancestral tongue of its people, the first film to be produced in such form. Those associated with the production are hopeful that it will not be the last of its kind.
This is just awesome. There has a been a concerted push from independent film makers in the past few years to make movies in their ancestral, often-dying, languages and I'm here for it. At the moment, I've got at least six students (all young women) who are studying Korean because they're so into one boy-band or another. And I'm all for it. But in my more idealistic moments, I wonder if we'll ever see the day when fans go all in on a band who performs in Navajo or Sioux or one of the other dozen vulnerable languages we have just in the U.S. I hope so. And I think having movies like Sooyii around is a hell of a good start.
I'm basing this entire essay on the linguistic aspects of advertising, but, if I'm being honest, advertising is also disturbing. Everything we've seen in the past couple of years around the idea of social media being bad for us because it's an echo-chamber or because it just reinforces ideas we already had -- all of that can be traced directly back to advertising. The truth is, much like a placebo, advertising works on us, even when we know we're being advertised to. And that is insidious at best.
One of the many sidetracks I found while writing my dissertation is the sheer volume of research that's been done into how the sound of different words affects people's perceptions of them. For instance, "s" and "z" sounds tend to be associated with speed in the minds of English speakers, which is why you hear so many of those sounds (in both normal words and onomatopoeic ones).
And if you're wondering why I'm scheduling this chapter for now, just as we head into the 2021 holiday season, well, this is my attempt at being subtle. How'd I do?
Back when I was teaching elementary school, I used to like to bring as many real-world items into class as possible to illustrate lessons and for the kids to practice with. While doing lessons about money (remember, I teach ESL), I would bring in a bunch of different McDonald's menus from around the world. The kids would always get excited because kids always get excited when they see their lives reflected in interesting ways, and, one time, I repeated a tagline from a recent Japanese campaign. Without missing a beat, the class clown (he was a great kid, they always are) sang the theme that played right after the tagline in the ad. Several other kids joined in. We spent twenty minutes trying to get back on track we were all laughing so hard. But never tell me advertising doesn't work.
One of my favorite examples of well-crafted advertising at work is Apple's "Think Different" campaign of the mid-aughts. The team that created the slogan knew that they would be criticised for using the adjective form of "different" when grammar rules would call for the adverb form (differently). They said that they were merely trying to reflect the way people actually spoke. But it's been suspected for years that at least part of the calculus was the boost the campaign would get by people being publicly pedantic about it. For everyone one person who ranted about it being wrong, three people went to look at an Apple computer.
Early 1400s and mid-1500s, respectively.
Sorry, not sorry. Not even a little.
I once read that every day, in America at least, each of us are exposed to approximately 5,000 advertisements and corporate logos. I find that terrifying, appalling, and unfortunately very likely true. So I am looking forward to this series on the linguists of advertising!