{"id":559,"date":"2012-09-06T17:59:47","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T22:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=559"},"modified":"2012-09-08T18:50:47","modified_gmt":"2012-09-08T23:50:47","slug":"do-these-ad-people-know-somethng-i-dont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=559","title":{"rendered":"Do These Ad People Know Something I Don’t?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>To continue my popular series of posts about people mis-using cliches, I’m today going to talk about a series of commercials from the good folks at Hyundai.\u00a0 They all play off the old question “Do you know something I don’t?”, and I actually think they are pretty funny, the ones I’ve seen so far.<\/p>\n

The problem is, they use that old saw to imply that people who drive Hyundais will seem smart.\u00a0 That is to say, they will appear to the casual onlooker to “know something” that the observer “doesn’t”.\u00a0 On the face of it, this would seem like a reasonable interpretation of the old saying,\u00a0 but you can’t go around interpreting cliches literally – it defeats the whole purpose.\u00a0 Pick any old saw at random, and this becomes obvious.\u00a0 You could stroll up to someone engaged in skinning a cat<\/a>, for instance, and observe that there were several ways he could go about it.\u00a0 But first of all, maybe you should reassess the kind of people you’re hanging around with, and second, duh (I mean, I’m assuming here, I haven’t tried doing it one way, much less multiple ways).\u00a0 But my point is, that is a hopelessly banal thing to say to a cat-skinner, when you could be asking whose cat that was, or whether there was some sort of medication they’d missed taking.\u00a0 The only time you would tend to talk about skinning cats is when you want to point out that there is more than one way to do something that isn’t<\/em> skinning a cat.<\/p>\n

No, the whole point of “Do you know something I don’t know?” is that it is somewhat ironical.\u00a0 Which is to say, you generally ask it of someone who appears to be doing something foolish, but you are willing to believe it is possible that they have a good reason to do something that appears to be a bad idea.\u00a0 In other words, you’re not quite willing to go so far as to say “you aren’t as dumb as you look”, but you are open to the possibility.\u00a0 So the only way that question makes sense in the context of a car commercial is if Hyundai is asserting that their vehicles are the object of scorn and ridicule, but they hope people will be moved to wonder if maybe there is more to them that meets the eye.\u00a0 I suspect that is not what the ad agency was aiming for.\u00a0 Which goes to show, that not only do these agencies need more technologically savvy employees<\/a>, they could apparently use a few English majors.\u00a0 Then again, maybe they just know something I don’t.<\/p>\n

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To continue my popular series of posts about people mis-using cliches, I’m today going to talk about a series of commercials from the good folks at Hyundai.\u00a0 They all play off the old question “Do you know something I don’t?”, and I actually think they are pretty funny, the ones I’ve seen so far. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grammar-gripery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}