The fat had no chance, not even at 40 degrees.

[On screen] DIGEST THE FATTY FOOD STAINS ORDINARY COMPACTS LEAVE BEHIND AT 40 DEGREES

[picture of the product]

The key line in the middle of the ad is a statement clogged with the words recommended by the oldest copy writing manuals. "Now there's new Ariel Ultra with fat digester, its remarkable new ingredient." But the rest of the ad breaks the pitch up. It starts with the women's questions, rather than statements. Note that the only command here is look. We are not being asked to buy the product, just to compare Ariel with others, to pay attention to the demonstration being provided for our benefit. We might also ask why the second woman says "I hate to admit it." Why should she mind? The form of this statement sets her up as a sceptical audience for the detergent's claims, as a voice separate from the announcer. Then the first woman follows with an exclamation, "The fat had no chance."

What about sentence structure? First, there is a parallel between the questions of the two women, and the announcer's response. This sets up the parallels at the end. The elliptical "And butter?" in line 3 suggests that the second woman is included in the conversation with the first, even though she is in a different laundry room. The "because it's fat" is also incomplete. This sort of ellipsis leads to the sense of a tough, straight talking voice. Of course the announcer's deep pitch, and the white letters on black, also help.

Let me summarise the main points of this chapter. You can look to the construction of sentences for clues to how the speaker is supposed to be related to us, the readers. The most fruitful place to start is probably asking about sentence type, because sentence types are usually easy to recognise. Then you can go on to observe the parallelism, ellipsis, and incomplete sentences. But remember there is no easy and direct connection of a form to a style or purpose. For that you must read more closely, considering what the writer is trying to do. You can't, for instance, assume that the use of more commands means a harder sell. What you can talk about is surprising variations from expectations -- for instance the fact that commands may be avoided, when they logically would be more common in ads.

I will end with one last example for you to try to reconstruct the voice of an ad, in a piece of superb, sneaky copy writing. On the left is a slightly yellowed photo of a chubby, smiling, naked one-year-old baby girl with a red bow in her hair, looking out at us. To the right of this is the line:

when was the last time you felt really comfortable with your body?

The copy includes commands, questions (including rhetorical questions), an exclamation, parallelism, substitution, ellipsis, and sentence fragments; you would think the copywriters had read this chapter. And of course the Nike slogan at the end is a powerful bit of substitution. But I am quoting it to show how all these stylistic devices are used to give the voice of a tough, close old friend, breaking out of the same magazine that it mocks. (I've kept the layout, because the short lines are part of the effect):

What happened?

One day you're strolling around in the buff and looking the world straight in the eye without

Then wallop! Puberty. Boys. Magazine images.

Suddenly the mirror is no longer your friend.

So who defined your template of beauty?

Who said you weren't OK? Get real.

Make your body the best it can be for one person. Yourself.

Further reading on sentence types and functions

Guy Cook, The Discourse of Advertising, Chapter 6, has a particularly strong analysis of parallelism, with good examples, and more detailed theoretical argument. Some more complex issues of language in use, related to those here, are taken up in Paul Simpson, Language, Ideology,

and Point of View, on pp. 147-156.

Linguists deal with the topics that I have covered in this chapter under two headings: grammar (for the structure of sentences) and pragmatics (for assumptions that enter in as language is used). There is more on grammatical description, applied to literary examples, in Geoff Leech and Mick Short, Style in Fiction, in Ron Carter and Walter Nash, Seeing Through Language, and in Roger Fowler, Linguistic Criticism (which focuses on social and ideological implications). The standard textbooks of pragmatics are Stephen Levinson, Pragmatics, which is rather difficult for non-linguists, and Geoffrey Leech, The Principles of Pragmatics, which explores politeness and irony in detail.

I have just touched on politeness in passing. The classic work on politeness in the

construction of sentences (for example, the use of questions for commands) is Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Politeness. For applications to literature, see Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson, eds., Language, Discourse, and Literature; that might be an easier place to start than with the rather heavy treatises and textbooks. For more on politeness in written texts, you could look at Greg Myers, "The Pragmatics of Politeness in Scientific Articles," which has further references.

Chapter 5

"Players Please": Puns, Associations, and Meanings

Sometimes guidebooks to copy writing, as to other kinds of writing, suggest that the message should above all be clear and easy to read. Let's test an example. Can you guess what product this headline is advertising?

First shoot your dog then freeze it

This ad makes us work, guessing what the ad could be for (see the illustration for the answer). It is hard to guess without the illustration, because the headline contains two puns, in which a word can have two or more possible meanings. The ad is startling because the first meaning that might occur to the reader is offensive ("Shoot your dog"). Then the picture directs us to a second meaning, one that is less of a threat to the dog. Puns are very common in British ads now (much less so in US or French ads). Their usefulness arises from factors that I mentioned in the chapter on advertising history. First, they attract the attention of bored readers, saturated with ads. Since a pun is by its nature not considered serious, they disarm scepticism. And the pun can be used in image creation, with the second meaning, the one that the reader is meant to reject, lingering, or not, with the product.

Puns are one of several sorts of play with meaning used in advertising. Compare these two famous cigarette slogans, the first British and the second American:

Players please.

Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.

The Players slogan is a pun, in which the samw words can have different meanings in two different sentence structures, since the full utterance can be interpreted as

Players please [you] [said by the advertiser] or

Please [give me some] Players [said by the customer]

The Marlboro slogan depends on the vague associations we have with Marlboro Country, as suggested by the pictures of ruggedly masculine cowboys and Western landscapes. The two ads play in different ways with meanings.

Where do we go to untangle the meanings of words used in ads? We might look first in a dictionary. It will help us where the same word is used with two distinct meanings of the same word, as in Players please. I will look at different ways these meanings can be related. But a dictionary cannot carry all the information about ways in which we build up associations with words; it will not help with the Marlboro slogan to look up country. So in the second part of the chapter, I will look at different ways words can take on these associations.

The Anatomy of Puns

Linguists have several classifications for the ways multiple meanings of one word are related. For our purposes, the key point is that some pairs of meanings seem closely related, hardly noticeable as a pun, while others seem far apart and it may require considerable hinting for us to see the pun. The more distant the relation of the two meanings, the more striking, but also more

strained, is the pun. This is not to say that advertisers will avoid the more distant relations of meanings; for some products they can use a groan just as well as a chuckle.

One kind of relation is so common it might be considered the basic advertising pun. In it, the same string of letters refers both to the name of the product, and to a word with its own everyday meaning:

SUNLIGHT IS BEST (Sunlight soap, 1890s)

Don't rough it. [picture of cactus] Live life in Comfort [picture of green sock matching the cactus] (fabric softener)

Here, both the light of the sun and Sunlight soap are best, and comfort is both a product (spelled with a C) and a feeling (with a c). This sort of pun is so common we hardly notice it, because of course the whole point of giving a product a name like this is that the producer wants us to carry

over associations from the ordinary meaning of the word to the product name (as we saw with Ivory soap in Ch. 2). In a variation of this strategy, the ad may use the word as part of a phrase as if it already had an everyday meaning, even if it does not.

Get that Pepsi® feeling TDK it

Pepsi is used as if it were an adjective, like happy or excited; TDK is used as if it were a verb, like

record. This sort of play on the product name must be effective, since it is still used after a hundred

years. But it is very boring.

Many of the puns in ads use two unrelated existing meanings of a word. Linguists call this

homonymy (using the same name for two things) and argue about which meanings can be said to be

unrelated. Dictionary makers try to put unrelated meanings in separate entries. But how do you tell? In some cases the distinction is clear, as in this old ad for B. F. Goodrich:

Is this the little flat you promised me?

The meanings of flat as "an airless tire" and "an apartment" are, as far as I know, unrelated. Let's look at a common advertising pun, on senses of light.

You can tell when the cook's seen the light. (olive oil)

Essilor Transitions lenses. As dark as it's light and as light as a feather. (Boots Opticians)

The meanings of light as as "not fattening," and as "not heavy" may be metaphorically related, but neither is related to the meaning as "that which shines", which gets a separate entry in a dictionary.

The pun will seem particularly strained, but particularly striking, if the word can fill two different grammatical categories. For instance, in the Penguin poster on railway platforms,

Book at any station.

Book is both the verb ("reserve a ticket") and the noun ("a bound volume of reading matter"). The

picture of the trademark Penguin at a station links the two. In an ad for Boots cosmetics, Face the world

face is both a verb and a noun, linking "the front of one's head" (the noun) to "confronting the

world confidently" (the verb). In most languages, words serving different functions will have different endings, so there will be no pun, but in English this kind of ambiguity between word classes is common. With these homonyms, we recognise that the two meanings are related only by chance, not naturally as an attribute of the product, and enjoy the way this chance link is brought out.

Far more common than homonymy is the use of related meanings of the same word. Linguists call this polysemy, and dictionary makers show it by putting several numbered senses under one headword in dark type. For instance, almost all names for parts of the body have metaphorical meanings as well -- head can be head of the body or head of the table or head of department or head of a phrase. Mouth can be mouth of the body or mouth of a river. These plays on meaning will be less surprising, but they will also seem more natural, as if the pun was waiting there all along and wasn't just coincidence. So for instance, US television ads for a company selling bonds tell heart-warming human stories and end with the slogan

Nuveen. The Human Bond.

Bond here is both the link of affection and commitment between humans, and the financial

instrument, which they are claiming is humanised by their company. A viewer may either come to see the financial instrument in terms of their familial links, or throw a shoe at the television to express their disgust that all human relations were being reduced to a financial investment. (I threw a shoe).

Common polysemic puns involve words like bright, naturally, clearly, where the advertiser will want both meanings. This headline ran above a picture of sheep.

Take it from the manufacturer.

Here the pun is a way of attributing wool, not to a manufacturing industry, but to nature. The more interesting ads, for me, are those that expect us to get one meaning of the phrase first, and then switch to another, prompted by the picture or the product name or some other clue.

America's favorite cigarette break. (Benson and Hedges, 1971; ran with pictures of the longer cigarette accidentally broken by, for instance, a windscreen)

Come to use when you want to talk rubbish (a local ad for skip rental; shown on the side of a skip)

All the reasons for buying a tumble dryer summed up in one line (Dry Electric; a washing line against a dark cloudy sky)

This switch is particularly effective where the advertiser wants to make us reflect on our reasons for our own first response, as in many ads for charities. An ad for Shelter shows a snapshot of a young woman. The headline reads

When Emma told us she'd been abused, we put her into a special home. Her own.

This works because of the pun and a carefully placed full stop. At the end of the first sentence, referring to a social problem, we might interpret home to mean "an institution for residential care". After the full stop we are told that it means "family home". So again, the point is not to arrive at a clear and unambiguous meaning -- the advertiser may want us to go through the work of trying to interpret.

Strategic Waffle

So far we can see two or more definite meanings in the examples, and we switch between them. Linguists call this ambiguity. It is worth distinguishing this from another indeterminate use of meaning, in which no definite meanings can be pinned down, creating a vague and undefinable aura around the word. Linguists call this vagueness.. Consider the italicized words in this ad for the Regency Hotel in New York: