Bruce the Blog

WHY HAVE LOCAL TV SPOTS GOTTEN SO ROTTEN?

I know what you are thinking. What does this guy mean “gotten so rotten”? Part of the “charm” of local cable TV commercials is their very lack of sophistication, the embarrassingly inept copywriting, the insistence of small-business owners to appear in their own commercials in a camp display of self-parody. All of that is in fact what makes these spots effective, or why would businesses continue spending money to air them?

But enough is enough. I’m now going to sound like the old fogey blogger who writes that “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty” page (hey, wait a minute, that’s me!), but the world of advertising’s creative corridors more than ever seem peopled by youth in search of couth. Sure, I know the AMC cable series Mad Men shows this isn’t exactly a 21st Century development. That show’s imaginatively named lead character Don Draper apparently is so named for being a Don Juan who drapes himself on women other than his spouse.

But at least in Mad Ave’s heyday of the 1960s there was a creative explosion of ingenuity. Again, I know we’re talking hyperlocal advertising, which is created by people who, if they could be making the big bucks in Manhattan or White Plains or wherever, would be there.

Instead, they fake it as copywriters with such offensive sloppy copy as the restaurant whose tagline tells us it’s “damn” good. It takes a lot of effort to make that once swear word offensive again, but that commercial manages to do it. It’s gratuitous and jarring and, like so much of amateurishly written ad copy, monumentally lazy.

Even worse is the auto dealer whose cable TV spot is so desperate to get the viewer’s attention, it comes as close as even cable standards and practices will allow to outright cursing by putting on screen the characters s**t then witlessly tells us it really is referring to “your old piece of … sheet metal.” I thought, Are they kidding? Unfortunately not. It’s axiomatic that the most creative work emerges from within clearly drawn limitations. Take away those lines, or blithely step over them, and creativity vanishes, as that commercial amply demonstrates, wherein humor is confused with crudity.

Actually, I think the “creative” person at the agency who came up with that piece of brilliance should win some kind of award. But first, they’ll have to create a category for 12-year-old copywriters.

HOLLYWOOD’S ‘UNEDUCATION’

There’s a new film release “The Education” I just learned about on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show. It looks very good, with relative newcomer Cary Mulligan in the lead, with Peter Skaarsgard, Emma Thompson and Alfred Molina rounding out the world-class cast.

Somewhat ironically, I already had planned to post this English Languish blog entry about Hollywood’s — or, for that matter, wherever a movie may originate — historic struggle with literacy in general and journalistic emulation in particular. I’ve rarely, if ever, for example, seen a newspaper front page depicted in a feature film that didn’t have what is to me a glaring error staring at me. It makes me wonder that if productions can afford to hire all kinds of technical and subject consultants (such as law enforcement professionals, doctors, lawyers), why does it seem they never bother to consult with a journalist when it comes to newspaper simulations? They probably do but just don’t bother to loop them in to such off-set, post-production details as a faux front page.

I don’t care that Sherlock Holmes topped the weekend’s box office. I had trouble staying awake (and saw it at 4:30 p.m. Christmas Day). It was hackneyed and formulaic, not unlike Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which DVD I just got unfinished not fully watching with my collegial daughter (review to come from Mom + Pop Culture presently), being duly distracted by Michael Wolff’s fascinating “The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.” The world-beating media mogul is anything but hackneyed and formulaic.

Sherlock’s corruption of the language began with a hackneyed, ridiculously redundant and fawning review I read by Gannett News Service reporter Bill Goodykoontz, who ended with, “…there could be worst crimes committed against the cinema.” That flub speaks to the unfortunate trend in our languishing literacy to misspell words based on how we hear them rather than respecting the structural integrity of language. I call it phonetic subliteracy. The archetypal example might be “for all intensive purposes” to mean “for all intents and purposes.”

I winced further watching Sherlock as a front page declares, “Sherlock Holmes aides police.” The noun aide means assistant. The verb aid means to assist. It’s unusual to see a less-common word like aide mistakenly replace a commonplace word like aid. Hooray not for Hollywood, where visual language is sacred state-of-the-art and verbal language too often is sloppily dropped on the cutting-room floor. In Hollywood, being educated means attending USC Film School, not having a well-rounded liberal arts education with a healthy respect for baseline literacy.

It’s actually unfair to isolate Hollywood as some kind of aberration these days when it comes to our national grammar stammer. In a major daily newspaper the other day, the word “reign” was used to mean “rein,” and those terms, unlike aide and aid, have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

SAVE THE WORD … DON’T SAY THE WORD (IF YOU DON’T HAVE TO)

A particularly subtle form of subliteracy — which might better be described as inarticulation or slovenly diction — is the habit of using more words than necessary. Another term to describing this grammatical gaffe would be “superfluous.” Better yet, with all due credit to Monty Python, this category falls into The Department of Redundancy Department.

EXAMPLES (as recently seen in major daily newspapers)

“pare down” — since pare means to cut away or trim, this is redundant because there’s no such thing as “pare up” or to pare any other way but down.

“rains down” — we intuitively know rain falls, so per the above example, it’s totally unnecessary to clarify “rains” by adding down

BUT THE GRANDDADDY OF ALL SUPERFLUOUS, UNNECESSARY, EXTRA, WASTEFUL, EVEN GRATUITOUS WORDS APPEAR IN ALMOST ALL MOVIES’ END CREDITS:

Why do they (and we) insist on saying and writing, “We wish to thank …” and “We would like to thank …”?

Why don’t we ever cut to the chase and simply say, “Thanks to the following …” -OR- “We thank those who made this night necessary …”?

Even twisted comic minds like Mel Brooks or Larry David surprisingly (to my knowledge) have never seized on this incongruity to exploit it as a (somewhat) obvious gag, to wit, “At this time, I would like to thank my family and friends for honoring me tonight. I really would like to do that. I really wish to thank them. But that wish won’t come true tonight — at least for them — because I owe them nothing.”

Solving our Failure to Communicate

Inference (Infer) and Implication (Imply) are not interchangeable.

They are the inverse of each other.

A speaker implies, or delivers, a secondary, unspoken meaning. A listener, on the other hand, infers, or receives, a secondary, unspoken meaning from what the speaker says or writes.

A writer for the Associated Press, David Bauder, got it wrong in an article published Feb. 24 about Fox creating a business channel to compete with CNBC. Harking (it’s not harkening) back to when Fox took on CNN with a round-the-clock news channel, he wrote, “a Fox slogan like ‘fair and balanced,’ with the inference that CNN wasn’t … ” He meant implication. The writer might contend he was referring to the public, or viewing audience, but in the context of his article, his subject is Fox, which delivers the slogan, not the viewer, who receives it.

It’s becoming more common elsewhere that journalists and other professional writers struggle with diction, or word choice. In some cases, it is so bad, it amounts to malapropism, an almost comic misuse of a word.

A recent blog I scanned contained a post from someone who said he had been a reporter for a quarter-century, then proceeded to tell us he was about to make some “observances,” which would make sense if he was due to celebrate a religious holiday. He of course meant observations.

In the same vein, on the Contents page of the February issue of Westchester Commerce, the house organ of The Business Council of Westchester, we learn that in the issue, new Council chairman, Stephen J. Jones, “discusses his goals and objections for 2007.” That is supposed to be objectives (we presume), because we did not spot any objections in his very articulate commentary.

Typically, a typographical error is a mechanical mistake (e.g., when a word is repeated or missing, or a letter is out of place), while use of the wrong word — like observances for observations — is a mental lapse, which afflicts us all from time to time.