Category: advertising

I am very happy right now, so I am just going to give a out little morsel to chew on.  It seems the curmudgeon in me doesn't come out when my wife is next to me and we are enjoying a quiet moment pursuing our interests in good company.  So I will be brief.

How is it that you never actually read a critic rave when you are getting the review first hand?  Raving is speaking or writing with wild enthusiasm.  So who is in charge of classifying a critics' words as wildly enthusiastic?  No one in particular of course.  That, my friends, is free entry into the scoundrel zone for these guys.  If a critic writes anything positive or even neutral about a restaurant, film, TV show, car, or anything, you can bet some enterprising scoundrel will find a way to spin it into a "rave".  No matter how mundane the critic's original meaning, and no matter how obvious it is to the audience, his/her words can be spun into a "rave" when an advertiser mentions the review in a commercial.  And it is not technically lying or even mischaracterization of words since their meanings are in the eyes of the beholder - the ad exec's eyes.  Then he gets to change the meaning of those words into whatever suits him when he relates them to the rest of us.  It's a twisted game of telephone.

"Rave" is a word that has been stolen by advertisers.  There others...