Author: Kirk

“Live Adventurous.”

Adjectives, Adverbs

My wife saw this yesterday in a TV commercial for Outback Steakhouse.

Problem:
The restaurant chain used an adjective where an adverb was required.

Explanation:
Outback Steakhouse now has “Live Adventurous.” as one of its advertising slogans, as my wife saw yesterday in a television advertisement from the chain.

The word “adventurous” is an adjective.

Adjectives modify nouns, not verbs, but Outback is using “adventurous” to modify a verb (“Live”).

Outback is trying to tell the viewer how to live.

This requires an adverb.

Many adjectives can be converted to adverbs by appending the L-Y suffix.

“Adventurous” is one of those adjectives.

This gives us the solution.

I suppose that Outback and its advertising firm were trying to be catchy or edgy by using an adjective where an adverb was required.

But I view this grammatical mistake as encouraging the decline of the distinction between adjectives and adverbs.

Solution:
“Live Adventurously.”

Time Management

General

I bought an excellent book on time management a few weeks ago.

Titled Time Management on Crack, it is aimed at anyone who has an Internet-based business, including bloggers like me … and many of my blog readers, I suspect.

The book is by a twenty-something author who is wise beyond his years.

His techniques have helped him be much more productive than most of his peers.

For example, he wrote, “I launched 52 internet marketing and programming products last year while also working a full-time day job. I have no employees.”

The author teaches that part of his technique requires a change of attitude or mind state toward time and tasks.

For example, he wrote, “I’ve used this mind state to write 25 articles in one plane ride, record 12 twenty-minute interviews in one morning, and record 50 five-minute videos in one day!”

The book comes with a money-back guarantee.

Given that it is priced higher than most bookstore books, I expected that I might have to use the guarantee.

But after I read the book and watched his accompanying videos, I was sure that his book was worth more than I paid for it.

To learn more about the book, go here.

Highly recommended!

“pre-owned”

Devolution toward Simpler, Euphemisms

I suspect that all of my U.S. readers have read or heard the adjective “pre-owned” in automobile advertising over the past several years.

This adjective seems to have begun with the dealers of higher-end automobiles as a euphemism for the adjective “used”.

“Used” apparently sounded too cheap, so dealers of such brands as Lexus and Infiniti started to use “pre-owned” instead to describe the same-brand vehicles in their used-car lots.

Contrary to my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis, it seems that nearly all auto-dealership advertisers today — no matter whether they carry luxury cars or econo-boxes — choose a two-syllable, nine-character word over a one-syllable, four-letter word that says the same thing.

But that is a frequent characteristic of euphemisms: People go out of their way to avoid what they believe will be perceived negatively.

If you find yourself saying or writing a longer word when you know that a shorter word will express the same thing, notice whether you are trying to hide a negative perception behind that longer word.