Taglines: a punctuation parable.

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”--Oscar Wilde

Punctuation is important. Grandma, especially, thinks so.

I started out writing a post about Whirlpool’s brilliantly-punctuated new tagline: the beauty of the comma placement; the deliberate lack of period that gives the phrase a double meaning.

Three choices make this phrase wonderful. 

1. The choice to make "every day" two words, rather than one, makes "every" an adjective that modifies "day," rather than "everyday" an adjective that modifies "care." It's deliberately not "everyday care."
2. The choice to use a comma puts this phrase in the imperative mood, making "care" a commanding action verb. (Linguistics Girl has a great post explaining this.)
3. The choice not to use a period, which goes a long way toward reversing the grammatical effect of the first two choices, giving the phrase two meanings at once. Without a period, the tagline isn't wholly a statement. It can do double duty, conveying both "everyday care" and "every day, care." If it had a period, the imperative mood would be much stronger, leaving the "everyday care" message in the dust.

The new campaign is about the everyday care that families give one another, and also implies the kind of care Whirlpool appliances give to our laundry and dishes. (Whirlpool's new Every Day Care Project web page and supporting assets do a wonderful job of conveying this sense.) The double meaning of the tagline is brilliant. It reminds me of another tagline's precise word and punctuation choices.

Grammar Girl has a great discussion of the grammatical implications of the use of "different," rather than "differently," in this famous Apple slogan. The use of "different" allows the phrase to mean both "think about different kinds of computers" and "think in a different way." 

A colon punctuating this phrase, "Think: different" would have emphasized the first meaning, "think about different computers." Without the period at the end, the slogan would lose some of the weight of the imperative mood; it wouldn't be as strong a command. As it is, the phrase conveys both meanings beautifully.

It was my intention to praise Whirlpool, and their agency, for this carefully-wrought phrase, perfectly punctuated to pack in double meaning.

But when I went on Whirlpool's web site to take a screen shot of the tagline, I found it used WITH A PERIOD.

Come on, Whirlpool. Make up your mind. Every day, care ... about punctuation. 

Let's Eat, Grandma image thanks to Modern Austen.


There are other ways to make taglines work harder. See How to Make Words Do More Work.

How to Make Words Do More Work

When you only have a few words to communicate a big idea, as in a tagline or a headline, you've got to make them do a lot of work.

In physics, doing work means acting on a body and creating displacement. In thermodynamics, work refers to energy transfer from one system to another. Likewise, when copy does work, it has an effect on the intended audience. Word for word, headlines have to do a lot more work than copy-heavy ads like this one.*

But how to string together a few measly words to make a really big statement? One way is to use double meaning, either with single words or phrases or with the way they're couched.

Netflix uses this device to great effect in their new campaign.

Tagline: "You gotta get it to get it."

The tagline, of course, means that you must be a subscriber to Netflix in order to understand the meaning of the image. (In this case, you really just need to be a child of the 80s, but that's beside the point.) The repetition of the phrase "get it" to capture each meaning creates a nice rhythm and sound, and the double meaning allows the tagline to do a great deal of work.

On their web site, Nike presents a succinct tagline with two meanings of "fit":

"Introducing the Nike Pro Rival Bra, the ultimate fit for the ultimate workout."

The idea of becoming physically fit is overlaid by the concept of a bra that fits well. Again, they've used the same word twice.

Double meaning in this sense is a like a pun, but it's not humorous; nor is it a double entendre, which implies that one of the meanings is, shall we say, indelicate. Whatever it's called, this device is used often in ads, and also in poetry.

Until "Evening Walk," however, I'd never seen an entire line, or series of lines, in a poem serve as a pun. Poet Charles Simic uses non-humorous puns in words and phrases to create uncertainty and double meaning which lead to a deep yin-yang tension. Here's the first stanza:

You give the appearance of listening
To my thoughts, O trees,
Bent over the road I am walking
On a late summer evening
When every one of you is a steep staircase
The night is slowly descending.

In the third line, are the trees bending over the road? Or, in a more Yoda-like construction, maybe the speaker is walking down the road, bent over. Is it late in the evening, or late in the summer--or both? At the end of this stanza, the trees are each a staircase, implying upward movement. (Will the speaker be ascending to heaven?) But this image is immediately reversed in the next line: instead, night is descending those staircases. The reader gets the sense of both upward and downward movement, and of lightness and darkness, at the same time.

Poems are written to be read, but (unfortunately for the word-lovers of this world) ads, brochures, and web sites can't be. They must be written on the assumption that they'll only be skimmed. I'd like to see (or write) a tagline or headline that can use a pun to create as beautiful and delicate a balance, and do as much work, as "Evening Walk."

Photo by Lynne Kirton [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

*By the numbers, each word in the Netflix ad must do approximately 135 times as much work as those in the Lien Foundation ad, although of course that's not how it works at all.

5 Better Taglines for Transformative Pencils

The tagline here reads: "You never know what a child could do with a pencil." Sounds kind of scary, to me. If you're a parent, you know. Your toddler could stab his sister in the eye with it, or stick it in a light socket, or eat it...the possibilities are endless.

This ad is trying to communicate "the possibilities are endless," too, but perhaps not in just that way. The copy here is clunky and easily misinterpreted; it also has no style, no rhythm, no flow, and no poetry.

What about something like...

1. Now that's a pencil with potential.
2. Pencils create change.
3. Just imagine what a pencil can become.
4. Pencils can transform people.
5. The potential of a pencil.

Now, these ads (see the rest here) are from Spain. Are they translated? That could explain the clumsy language. In my limited experience, the answer would be no, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Via Ads of the World