On my way home from work tonight, I heard a radio programme about language. One of the things they were discussing was language bloopers. You know, the sort of terrible mistake you make when you are using a word that you THINK you know the meaning of but really you’re not sure.
One of the examples they quoted tonight was the poor hapless chap who said ‘this organisation really had got its testicles into everything’ – of course he meant tentacles and in this case it was almost certainly a slip of the tongue rather than a case of not knowing the meaning of the word…..I can’t believe anyone who uses the English language wouldn’t know a testicle from a tentacle.
Of course we all do it, both in writing and spoken word and I have found myself, since starting my diary here on PBASE getting ever more concerned to make sure I get my grammar and spelling right.
I do recall though, as a young client service person way back when, I used to look after the market research needs of Rowntree. One of two great confectionery companies in the UK, both started and run for many years by Quakers. The other, of course, was Cadbury. Rowntree was sold to the Swiss food giant, Nestle in the mid-80s.
Back then, I’d not done much work-wise that required writing stuff. I had spent many of the preceding years of my career working with numbers rather than words. It came as a bit of a shock to me to use words ‘in anger’ as such and I was desperate to make a good impression. But,I made a blooper that I continue to cringe at today.
In the marketing and market research world, one of the most difficult challenges is in classifying of products. For example today I have been wrestling with the difference between migraine and headaches. In my view, many companies go to some fairly extreme lengths to make sure they can claim brand leadership of a particular market. In the days I worked on Rowntree brands, we used to distinguish between Milk Chocolate Assortments and Plain Chocolate Assortments. The consumer clutching a few quid didn’t distinguish between the two and would choose seemingly randomly between the two ‘categories’. It was done with good reason though – Cadbury made Milk Tray – a hugely successful MILK chocolate assortment and Rowntree made Black Magic and guess what? It was a PLAIN chocolate assortment. That meant both companies were happy because you could distinguish between the two and each company then had a brand leader.
As a novice presenter, I was asked to present the Milk Solid Blocks market (Cadbury Dairy Milk, Yorkie and Galaxy). This market had in it a brand called Aero. This was (and as you can see from this photo, still is) an aerated chocolate bar, the one in the photo has a minty flavoured centre, hence the green. We used to present the aerated sector as a sub-set of the category because it wasn’t technically ‘solid’ and guess what? Yep – by taking it out of the main market, it became a brand leader in its sub-set. Stranger than fiction I hear you cry!
Anyway, I got up to do my presentation and noticed a few sniggers from people in the audience but I didn’t work out why until I was in the car on the way back to London from York and my boss (very sweetly and tactfully as I recall) said to me he’d always pronounced aerated as aerated and he didn’t realise you could also pronounce it ariated……ariated is a slang word for cross or angry. It doesn’t exist in the dictionary but is in common use.
I wished the floor would open up and swallow me – I’d made a total fool of myself in front of a whole bunch of people who had my early career in their hands – had they not liked me, I’d have been dumped from the team and who knows where I’d have been now. The power of language to make or break is immeasurable…….and I want to make sure in future it makes things for me!!
