Month: April 2009

“A prestige watch is part of your image.”

Adjectives, Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

I saw this in the subject line of a spam email message a week ago.

But this statement means nothing except for the positive implication that the spammer wants to give it.

Someone usually says a statement such as “It is a prestige product.” to tell the listener that “it” is a high-prestige product.

But the noun “prestige” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “A prestige watch is part of your image.”?

This statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “prestige” must be hyphenated with an adjective to form a compound adjective that can indicate the value of the noun — in this case, “watch” — that the compound adjective modifies.

In contrast to the inherently meaningless statement “A prestige watch is part of your image.”, here are some meaningful statements:

  • “A high-prestige watch should be part of your image.”
  • “A low-prestige watch should not be part of your image.”
  • “A prestigious watch should be part of your image.”

I believe that the use of the noun “prestige” in place of the adjective “prestigious” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to speak or write the two-syllable, eight-letter noun than it is to speak or write the three-syllable, eleven-letter adjective.

So respond with a “Huh?” the next time that someone says to you a statement such as “It is a prestige product.”, and see what happens.

“in this day in age”

Conjunctions, Mispronunciations, Prepositions

This is a bastardization of a phrase.

Problem:
The second “in” is incorrect in this phrase.

Explanation:
The conjunction “and” is often mispronounced by Americans as if it were the preposition “in”.

The correct phrase is “in this day and age” — with the conjunction “and” between the word “day” and the word “age” — because one can write “in this day” or “in this age”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “in this day and age” — with the conjunction “and” — 3,030,000 matches
  • “in this day in age” — with the preposition “in” — 113,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “in this day and age” versus the incorrect “in this day in age” by a ratio of 26.8-to-1, which is very good.

Solution:
“in this day and age”

“Honda has the highest … of any other car company.”

Adjectives

I heard this in a TV commercial ten days ago.

Problem:
The word “other” does not belong in the statement.

Explanation:
The complete statement in the television commercial was, “Honda has the highest residual value of any other car company.”

The commercial was produced by Honda to promote Honda automobiles.

But the statement talks about Honda as if it were one of the “other” car companies.

In other words, the statement implies that there is a car company that could have higher residual value than Honda and all the “other” car companies and that Honda has the highest residual value among those “other” car companies.

If Honda’s desire was to say that its automobiles have the highest residual value among all car companies, then the solution comes from removing the adjective “other” from the statement.

Solution:
“Honda has the highest … of any car company.”