Defying health
Saturday, February 24th, 2007(I started to write this about a week ago. I’d tell you whose commercial it is except that, once I started to write this post last week, it stopped appearing on the channels I watch—maybe someone clued in or they got complaints.)
This is something that has been nagging at me and, since it has to do with the use (or rather misuse) of the English language, this seemed a good place to air my grievance.
There is a commercial that has been a lot of airplay lately, which features a number of health-related images and a narrator speaking cryptically about something:
“It is our most valuable possession. We protect it. Nurture it. Toast it. Sometimes it has the upper hand. Other times we do. We discuss it, debate it, prolong it, defy it. Some devote their lives to it. Others take it for granted.”
At the end of the commercial, we discover that they are talking about “our health”. The problem is that “our health” doesn’t fit many of the phrases they’ve used in the commercial. “Our health” doesn’t get “the upper hand”. We don’t defy “our health”. We don’t really talk about prolonging “our health”. It’s as though whoever wrote and/or edited the commercial forgot what the cryptic something was and thought at various points that it was “life” or “death” or even just “good health” vs “bad health” rather than plain old neutral “our health”.
In contrast, Becel has a similar commercial currently airing in which their cryptic “something” is “heart” and they are very consistent about the phrases they use in relation to it.