COMMERCIALS

A number of the television shows I enjoy, like NCIS, Castle, and Rizzoli & Isles, run on the USA and TNT networks, which means I see a fairly large number of commercials.  I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but the rhetoric employed seems to be getting a progressively weaker grasp on reality and truth.  One of my pet peeves is when a meaningless phrase is used to fool the listener into thinking something meaningful has been said.  My pet example is “real ingredients”.  As opposed to unreal ingredients?  What the advertiser wants you to think you heard, of course, is “real good ingredients”, but with the deniability that comes from having said nothing at all.

And, of course, I really love the commercials with fine print messages on the screen, where they give truth of the special car deal or the side effects of a drug.  Somehow, probably with liberal applications of money, the FCC has been conned into believing that these unreadable, and often unnoticed, flashes on the screen really satisfy the advertisers’ disclosure obligations.

Oh, and a note to the Lincoln concierge – a hole in the roof of a car, no matter how large, cannot be a “panoramic opening”.  A panorama is what we see out of the windows.  Panorama is Greek for ‘see all around’.  That hole in the roof is typically called a 'moon roof'.