Sorry, ‘clean’ is not one of your choices

I know the object of advertising is to make audiences remember and buy the product, and that correct use of language is secondary. But sometimes incorrect use of language can make an ad say the opposite of what was intended.

The current ad campaign for Tide detergent features the slogan “Style is an option. Clean is not.”

They are trying to say, “Clean is mandatory,” and maybe most audiences will interpret the ad that way.

But “not an option” has another meaning that will readily come to mind for many viewers and readers, thanks to a famous quote: “Failure is not an option.” Gene Kranz was definitely not telling the Apollo 13 Mission Control crew that failure was mandatory. He was saying that failure was not one of the choices available to them. In my opinion, this is a much stronger connotation of “not an option,” and in any case the phrase is ambiguous. (By contrast, “not optional” clearly means “mandatory.”)

So the Tide ads could inadvertently be telling some audience members: “Style is something you can do. Getting your clothes clean is something you can’t do.”

Past-present confusion in headlines makes me tense

A little friendly banter about an article on Slate.

Unpleasantries

At the grocery checkout, the cashier says “Hi” to me without smiling.

I say, “Hi. How are you?”

She sighs. “I’m here.”

Why that is so irritating:

1. Duh. I know you are “here.” That’s why I asked “How are you?” and not “Where are you?”
2. “I’m here” is one of those cop-out phrases that says volumes without officially saying anything. If you refuse to tell me how you are, that means I wouldn’t like the answer, which means you are unhappy — so you want me to know you are unhappy, but you don’t want to be accountable for having said so. Lame.
3. People in service roles (especially at this grocery chain) are supposed to be focused on their customers. You should have answered the question succinctly and shifted the attention to me (“Good, thanks. And how are you?”).
4. When you act miserable, it makes your customers feel unwelcome and unappreciated.

Asking “How are you?” is what is known as a pleasantry, and it should be answered with another pleasantry. Basic manners, really.

Convicted by the media

Any good copy editor knows that people aren’t “arrested for” doing things — they are arrested “on suspicion of” doing things. Then the courts decide whether the arrested people did the things they are suspected of.

It’s bad enough when a person who is ultimately convicted in court is first convicted by the media. But in this story, the arrested person (John Kerry’s daughter) turns out not to have been DUI according to the result of her sobriety test, yet the headline at Us magazine’s site says she was “arrested for DUI.”

At a minimum, the headline should read “arrested on suspicion of DUI,” but a responsible news agency would make it clear somehow (in the headline) that Ms. Kerry was not legally intoxicated.

Scammers’ grammar

It’s offensive enough that e-mail scammers want to dupe me into sending them money. But if they really think I’m going to take this for a legitimate message from UPS, that’s really insulting.

From: United Parcel Service [mailto:absolveslun@rgaleatherworks.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 1:39 AM
To: info@adefinancial.com

Subject: Fedex Tracking N5421062126

Unfortunately we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on October the 18st in time because the recipient’s address is not correct.

Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office

Your UPS

Come on, scammers. At least put some effort into it. How about spending some of your ‘earnings’ to hire a copy editor?

Our real names

In the car, on the way home from an outing, I started trying to explain to Jacob that my name is not “Daddy” even though he calls me that.

In the space of a few minutes, he went from “No! Your name’s Daddy!” to “Oh, your name is Dave Domingo” to “I’m going to call you Dave Domingo.” I explained (artfully, I thought) that he gets to call me Daddy, that it’s special, that only he and his brothers get to do that. He bought it, and I am now being called Daddy again.

Then I asked him what Mama’s name is. Without hesitation, he said, “Sweetie.”

Makes me want to go there

My friend Gordon Cooper just sent me a copy of his Watkins Glen Tour Guide. I helped with the book in a few ways — mainly by acting as a sounding board when Gordon was making style and organization decisions early on and by line-editing the text as he got ready to go to press with it.

The premise: As the reader tours Watkins Glen State Park and certain neighboring areas in the Finger Lakes region of New York, the book provides turn-by-turn directions and abundant facts about what the reader is looking at.

The real beauty of it is in the details: original maps with numbered symbols corresponding to text and picture entries;  pairs of photos comparing the present-day views of places to the way they looked in earlier times; a running count of how many stairs the reader has ascended and descended while exploring “the glen”; tips on where to eat and shop; and just great writing. Gordon truly anticipates the reader’s every need and curiosity.

This is a singularly impressive, entertaining and useful book. I’m proud to have been involved in producing it. I also wish I had the time and resources to go to Watkins Glen and take the tours myself!

Late night monologues in your inbox

If you want to subscribe to a daily roll-up of Letterman’s, O’Brien’s, Ferguson’s and Kimmel’s monologues, click here.

I have been going to NewsMax’s “late night jokes” page for years. It doesn’t have an RSS feed, but today it occurred to me that there is probably at least one web-based tool that converts any web page to an RSS feed — and of course I was right (because no matter what you want converted to what, there is a tool that does it).

The magic site I found is Page2RSS. You can use it to make a feed of any web page so its updates will come to you as e-mail. Slick!

iTunes is punishing me for not owning an iPod

I downloaded eight tracks from iTunes Tuesday night. Getting those tracks to play on my Pocket PC phone has been one of the most frustrating tech user experiences of my life.

I copied the new tracks from the iTunes library and pasted them to the Mini SD card that I use in my phone. Then I set out for my train commute, happily anticipating listening to my new music during the ride. Turns out that the music I paid $1 per track for will not play on anything but iTunes or an iPod. Maybe everyone else in the world already knows this. I didn’t.

When I got to work, I looked online for tools to convert the iPod format (protected MP4) to something that would play on my Pocket PC. Easiest solution: Use iTunes to burn to CD; then use Windows Media Player to rip them back to the hard disk as WMA files.

So I installed iTunes on my work computer. It started importing the music I already had on my hard disk into the library. Nice, but the tracks I just bought were on the Mini SD card on my phone, so it did not import them. After that very long library update, I had to manually import the tracks I actually wanted into the library. I should have put them all in one folder and imported the folder, but I had a brain fart, so I had to do the “Add File to Library” process instead.

“Add File to Library” absolutely sucks. You can’t select multiple files; you have to do the whole browse thing for each file you want to bring in. In addition, the browse dialog always shows  the folder in “list” mode (versus “details”) and defaults to sorting by title. So eight times, I clicked “Add File to Library,” changed to “details” display, sorted by “type” and scrolled to the bottom, where the MP4 files were — and double-clicked the *one track* that I was allowed to import at a time.

Then I had to figure out how to burn the files to a CD in iTunes. It couldn’t be as simple as selecting multiple files, right-clicking and adding them to a ”burn list’ a la WMP. I had to create a playlist, drag the files to the playlist, and then burn the playlist. Fine. Done

Next step: Use WMP to rip the files back to the hard disk. That was easy, but guess what. *&^%ing iTunes didn’t put any of the metadata about the songs on the CD. The ripped tracks are called “Track 1,” “Track 2,” etc.  So now I have to hand-jam all that data in the properties of each file.

I really resent that for exactly the same price that I could have paid at Amazon, Walmart.com or any of a thousand other online stores, I got music that (by design!) can be played only on Apple’s shiny little overpriced players.

I am never using iTunes again, even to collect free Podcasts (which, for some reason, don’t have the same restrictions as the stuff that costs money). I am never buying an iPod. And I am never going in an Apple store again — sorry, Sweetie, you will have to shop there alone; catch up with me at Sears.

Twizzler conversation

Jacob, 3, pointing to a package of Twizzlers on the counter: “I want that.”

Me: “Not right now.”

“But I went poop.” (referring to successful toilet use the day before)

“You don’t go poop once and get licorice forever.”

(Calmly and confidently) “Yes, I do.”