So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[tonyb]

Commercials for Lume. Actually, any commercials that are cheap disgusting shock value to get my attention.

Now Secret brand is marketing — to women exclusively, by the looks it — what they call “Whole Body” deodorant. The TV spots are, if anything, even more, um, explicit(?), than the Lume commercials.

They’re kinda amusing, in their way, and I can’t imagine that not being by design.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm a sixty-one year old woman, and as gawd is my witness, it has never once occured to me to do what they do in that commercial. But the expression on the face of the gal doing it as she does it makes me laugh out loud.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

This evening I saw two commercials for whole body deodorants to include the unsurprising arm pits, then on to the crotch and the feet. It's a wonder none of these people had ever heard of a shower with soap.

 

[Edward]

Clever marketing. I remember reading a business study years ago about a toothpaste manufacturer that increased profits substantially simply by making the nozzle of the tube fractionally wider so every use took that little bit more out. Sounds to me like 'whole body deodorant' is simply a way of encouraging faster usage, thus greater consumption, so more profit.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Some youngsters here, including Turks, spray Axe deo on their jackets, for whatever reason.

 

[Zombie_61]

This headline is a late night joke waiting to happen.

https://www.sciencealert.com/huge-study-confirms-viagra-cuts-alzheimers-risk-by-over-50

Maybe, but it makes sense to me. Healthy, proper circulation that provides nutrients to all parts of the body can only maintain or increase the health of cells and tissues, and that's essentially how medications like Viagra work--by opening capillaries, veins, arteries, and so on; improved blood flow.

 

[tonyb]

Clever marketing. I remember reading a business study years ago about a toothpaste manufacturer that increased profits substantially simply by making the nozzle of the tube fractionally wider so every use took that little bit more out. Sounds to me like 'whole body deodorant' is simply a way of encouraging faster usage, thus greater consumption, so more profit.

That’s how it appears to me.

 

[tonyb]

This thread sparked memories of a product advertised in the late 1960s called FDS, an abbreviation of Feminine Deodorant Spray. I can’t recall any mention of it since, so I looked it up and, yup, it’s still being made. You can get it online and at finer retailers everywhere.

So I suppose there’s really very little new under the sun, or the waistband.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Summertime switch...

 

[GHT]

In contemporary terms it's quite ‘old school’ to receive a handwritten letter, everything is expected to be so instantaneous these days: we are forever clamouring for an immediate response by text, instant message or email.

Previous generations found it rude to have a typed personal letter, as if we could not make the effort to write by hand. My mother was a stickler for protocol It was always drilled into my siblings and I that we should write thank you letters for gifts and cards, by hand.

Mother's encouragement to hand write led me to develop a fine hand. Well composed letters written in cursive script are a kind of art form. But the letter has to be properly set out. A handwritten letter can be the pinnacle of communications and something to treasure.

 

[LizzieMaine]

This thread sparked memories of a product advertised in the late 1960s called FDS, an abbreviation of Feminine Deodorant Spray. I can’t recall any mention of it since, so I looked it up and, yup, it’s still being made. You can get it online and at finer retailers everywhere.

So I suppose there’s really very little new under the sun, or the waistband.

Gynecologists will tell you to stay far far away from this stuff or anything like it. If you sense that you need such a product, there's a good chance that there's something wrong and you need to get it checked. The current fad is just more of the same Boys From Marketing bushwa.

 

[tonyb]

In contemporary terms it's quite ‘old school’ to receive a handwritten letter, everything is expected to be so instantaneous these days: we are forever clamouring for an immediate response by text, instant message or email.

Previous generations found it rude to have a typed personal letter, as if we could not make the effort to write by hand. My mother was a stickler for protocol It was always drilled into my siblings and I that we should write thank you letters for gifts and cards, by hand.

Mother's encouragement to hand write led me to develop a fine hand. Well composed letters written in cursive script are a kind of art form. But the letter has to be properly set out. A handwritten letter can be the pinnacle of communications and something to treasure.

View attachment 603423

I got shuffled around so much in my childhood that the schools I attended had either already gotten to teaching cursive or hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

This lousy penmanship has been of little negative consequence in my life. It’s among the “old school” disciplines that have fallen by the wayside in my lifetime. (My Dear Old Ma has elegant handwriting, as do many people — women, mostly — of her time.)

I might hand write more if my penmanship was better. In my newswriting days I developed my own sort of shorthand for note taking, legible to me exclusively. (My Dear Old Ma learned shorthand in high school, as did many people — mostly women, again — of her time.)

I am so in the habit of rewriting that even in personal correspondence I use digital gizmos. I would by necessity be more careful if rewriting involved starting over at zero, as would be the case with writing with pen and paper.

Has it made us lazy? In a way, I suppose. My concern is that new communications technologies will make obsolete many of what we used to call “basic skills.” Many of those skills will be (are?) no longer necessary to function in society. I doubt literacy itself will fall by the wayside, although I have heard speculations to that effect.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

When did "gift" become a verb?
Oh, and when you're tempted to use an adjective as an adverb, just say no! Add the "ly" to the end, please!

And while I'm on a rant-and-roll, how about "myself"? It's a reflexive pronoun, not an ordinary objective one. "Please get in touch with Jim or myself if you have further questions." NO! NO! NO! The correct pronoun in that situation is "me", not "myself", not "I"!

You might correctly say "I shot myself in the foot, there." because the action is yours and the object of the verb is you.

There! I think I've met the "trivial" goal here.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Myself" used in that way is maybe the most common example in modern spoken English of what dialect specialists call "hypercorrection." It's what happens when a speaker is afraid of using the wrong form of a word so they use a form that "sounds" correct, but is in fact an overcorrection and therefore is not correct.

You also hear it a lot among speakers of non-rhotic dialects who, trying to compensate, overexaggerate the pronunciation of postvocalic "r" sounds. My mother is notorious for this, and it drives me crazy. You're from the Northeast. You don't have to pronounce "r." "Cah" or "caww" are both perfectly acceptable in any social company here. But stretching it out to "cawrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" because somebody from California made fun of you at work thirty years ago is just sad and cringey.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Gynecologists will tell you to stay far far away from this stuff or anything like it. If you sense that you need such a product, there's a good chance that there's something wrong and you need to get it checked. The current fad is just more of the same Boys From Marketing bushwa.

And even GDR had that crap.

 

[tonyb]

I’ve become more accepting of “incorrect” grammar the older I get. Popular usage trumps, eventually, and what once might have marked a person a poorly educated rube is now acceptable even in academic writing.

Friends with Piled Higher and Deepers use the language in ways that might have had them flunking low level English classes a couple-three generations back. And don’t get me started on the daily missives from the editor of the leading local news outlet. Sometimes I wonder if he bothers reading through it before sending it out.

But I violate the rules of standard English grammar (whatever the hell that is these days) myself, usually knowingly. Sometimes the wrong word is the best word. And it’s fine in my book to start sentences with conjunctions and end them with prepositions.

 

[Benny Holiday]

My pet hate is "If I had of . . ." instead of "if I had've . . ." when people write.

The Australian accent is well known for having lost any trace of the rhotic 'r' sound way back in the Colonial past, but I wasn't aware just how pronounced our accents sound until my first trip to the States. Compared to my mother, for example, who, though raised middle-class, had quite a broad accent, I thought mine had become more Standard over the years. Or maybe not.

I remember a guy in LA asking me one day, "One thing I've just got to know: What does 'garn' mean?"

I replied I wasn't sure what he meant. "Well, you Aussies say 'garn' a lot."

"We do?"

"Yeah."

"How do we say it? In what context?"

The Angeleno replied in perfect imitation of a VERY broad Australian accent, "Owyah garn!"

"Oh," I replied in shock, thinking, do we really sound like that??? "That's 'How are you going?' "

Of course we pronounce car like "cah" and far like "fah" and burger like "burgah". My Dad would pronounce Saturday as "Satdee" and sandwich as "sammich". And the other thing I hadn't noticed until an American pointed it out to me was that we tend to drop or change the T in some words. Like, twenty will become 'twenee" and thirty will become "thirdee", eighteen will become "eighdeen". I hadn't noticed that before.

 

[tonyb]

My peeve is speakers who use hackneyed phrases incorrectly and mindlessly, such that what they say is in many cases just the opposite of what they mean.

Example: “l could care less!”

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

My pet hate is "If I had of . . ." instead of "if I had've . . ." when people write.

The Australian accent is well known for having lost any trace of the rhotic 'r' sound way back in the Colonial past, but I wasn't aware just how pronounced our accents sound until my first trip to the States. Compared to my mother, for example, who, though raised middle-class, had quite a broad accent, I thought mine had become more Standard over the years. Or maybe not.

I remember a guy in LA asking me one day, "One thing I've just got to know: What does 'garn' mean?"

I replied I wasn't sure what he meant. "Well, you Aussies say 'garn' a lot."

"We do?"

"Yeah."

"How do we say it? In what context?"

The Angeleno replied in perfect imitation of a VERY broad Australian accent, "Owyah garn!"

"Oh," I replied in shock, thinking, do we really sound like that??? "That's 'How are you going?' "

Of course we pronounce car like "cah" and far like "fah" and burger like "burgah". My Dad would pronounce Saturday as "Satdee" and sandwich as "sammich". And the other thing I hadn't noticed until an American pointed it out to me was that we tend to drop or change the T in some words. Like, twenty will become 'twenee" and thirty will become "thirdee", eighteen will become "eighdeen". I hadn't noticed that before.

Don't forget the companions, "could of" , "would of", and "should of"!

As for antipodean accents, I find Kiwi harder than Aussie.

I'm fond of the now-wrapped-up New Zealand TV series "Brokenwood". I find myself turning on the subtitle feature so that I can pick up all the dialogue. Maybe it's not so much the accent per se, (some of it does sound odd to an American ear, like the very short vowel pronunciation in words like "pen" [How do Kiwis differentiate between "pen" and "pin" in spoken communication where the context might not make it clear?]) but the inclusion of Kiwi slang and Maori words that find their way into the scripts.

 

[GHT]

But I violate the rules of standard English grammar (whatever the hell that is these days) myself, usually knowingly. Sometimes the wrong word is the best word. And it’s fine in my book to start sentences with conjunctions and end them with prepositions.

Tell me Tony, can something be “very” unique? No, it can't. Neither can it be “somewhat” unique or “rather” unique. Reason being, unique means “one of a kind,” and you can't modify that; it's either unique or it's not. Trivial? Of course and on the subject of grammar, overuse of filler words like: basically, evidently and literally get the hackles up.