HOW BIG A HOUSE do you need to make “homemade” ice cream?
If you have one of those electric gadgets that can turn out a pint of mushy ice cream for about $11 worth of ingredients, you can prepare that pint in a studio apartment. But you’d need every room in a mansion to supply a chain of stores.
My son Bob (an InfoWorld columnist) took his two little daughters out for some ice cream. He chuckled when he told me about it:
“It’s called `Kemp’s Homemade ice cream,'” he said. “They sell it in a couple of hundred stores. I’d like to go to their house and watch Mrs. Kemp wrestling with half a ton of chocolate syrup.”
The “homemade” conceit set me to thinking about all the phrases we in the force-communication universe corrupt in our mindless grappling for attention and sales.
One of the most obvious…and it also applies to ice cream…is “old-fashioned.” Curious, isn’t it, in the rocket-speed Internet era, that we venerate the past when we’re describing a space-age pistachio-nut concoction. Oh, we understand the sales pitch behind the label: Contemporary products, they tell us, are loaded with ersatz ingredients such as sawdust and iron filings and camel dung; theirs come from cows whose udders are massaged with Jergen’s lotion.
So OK, “old-fashioned” can be a smart (if semi-subliminal) marketing ploy. But please, please, refuse to buy any item advertising itself as “old-fashion.” Truncating the phrase is the work of semi-literates, and if you patronize them what does that say about you?
Two curious descriptions are “original” and “new and improved.” Even more curious is the oxymoron resulting from combining them – a symbol of copywriting desperation.
What benefit does the word “original” transmit? In one of its purer interpretations, the word means unchanged. First (original) definition, American Heritage Dictionary: “Preceding all others in time.” Would you want to be writing or handling a layout or doing a spreadsheet with your original computer, which in 1986 was the wonder of its time with 20 megabytes of memory and 4 megabytes of RAM? Would you want to submit yourself to the original treatment for many illnesses – heated cups stuck onto your back by the local barber?
“New and improved” is a nondescript non-description. In what way? I remember without any particular fondness reading that phrase on containers of the semi-tasteless orange drink Tang. Oh, yeah, I had to admire the honesty behind it – “The previous formulation wasn’t very good but we marketed it anyway.”
“New and improved” somehow parallels a sign on a failed business: “Under new management.” So what? Those of us whose incomes depend on success in driving customers or clients through the door certainly ought to know that benefit outsells thin chest-thumping. In what way is it new? In what way is it improved? Or is the claim a hope that dissatisfied buyers will ignore their previous disgruntlement?
Yeah, I’m being wry, but the conclusion isn’t wry: Whatever use we make of “original” and “new and improved,” we have better expressions at our command; or, at least, as professionals we should have better expressions at our command.
Let’s add two massive entries to our list: “heavy duty” and “heavyweight.” I admit to being a sometime patron of “heavy duty”; but after buying some “heavy duty” AA batteries at Walgreen’s, I no longer can accept the term without challenging it as puffery. Wouldn’t it be nice if our bu-reau-crazed government added one more: The Department of Heavy Duty Evaluation?
“Heavyweight” doesn’t carry as heavy a burden as “heavy duty,” so let’s consider this just a preliminary warning, a caution: If you describe something as a heavyweight, meaning anything other than avoirdupois, accompany that claim with an explanation.
Which brings us to “discount.” Living in Florida, I’ve become immunized to the word, which attaches itself leech-like to stores and space ads and mailings and Web offerings, often mindlessly and often duplicitously. Oh, it still works on the unaware. For those of us whose skepticism it regularly feeds, the word needs validation. Who has been responsible for the latter-day rash of unbacked claims of “discount”? Wal-Mart? No, Wal-Mart’s prices actually are discounted. A simple demand: Discounted from what?
What else? “King-size.” For beds and bedding, it’s a measurable absolute. For a claim from the clouds, it conjures up the image of getting something bigger and/or more intense than we’re paying for. We see the intensification at work in “King-size discount.” The Mother of all discounts? Based on the typical shouter of the phrase, it should be.
A recent addition – in fact, I’d place it from around 1998 – is “Enterprise.” Now, this isn’t the original enterprise as we’ve always known it; nor is it the starship. No, no, it’s the new and improved Enterprise with a capital “E,” grasped to the bosom of electron-lovers. We see magazine columns and entire books with the “Enterprise Computing” title. What does it mean? I’ve asked several who inhabit that half-world to explain the term; invariably the answer is something like, “It’s the whole thing…the entire…well, the entire enterprise.” Oh. Thanks.
One more for now: “world class.” I have no idea from whence this phrase came; somehow I associate it with that marvel of corruption, the Olympic Games. But maybe I’m wrong. Our shrunken globe, rubber-banded into a tight little ball by jet aircraft and discounted (for real) fares, has eliminated many of the peaks and valleys we used to assume were there, between Texas and Tajikistan. So “world class” already may be on the route to join “23 skiddoo” and “hooch inspector” and “cuspidor” as a once-active expression.
Aw, enough already. Are these the only candidates? Readers of this diatribe undoubtedly have others to contribute. If you have some favorites, tell me so and we might immortalize them and you in another harangue. But don’t give me “ultimate” or “Your partner in … .”
I’m saving those.
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