Nov 21st, 2008 at 10:12 am
Creating Magical Enjoyment You Feel Good About
Travel to Europe’s small countries always offers one an intriguing glimpse of the world’s linguistic future — English spoken universally, but not quite right (admittedly, it’s an unfortunate coincidence that the world’s lingua franca is also the language that features the greatest proliferation of irregularities and so forth). Nestlé headquarters was full of promotional copy that didn’t scan right to a native speaker. Sometimes, they seemed to be working of a very literal translation from French. But then there was this:
I think I’d like to make that this blog’s new slogan. Creating magical enjoyment you feel good about since 2002.
66 Responses to “Creating Magical Enjoyment You Feel Good About”
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November 21st, 2008 at 10:16 am
“creating magical enjoyment you feel good about!” — I thought that was what blogging was all about?
November 21st, 2008 at 10:18 am
haha. I didnt’ see Matt’s last line before I spoke above
November 21st, 2008 at 10:19 am
That’s a change I can believe in.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:20 am
nestle adopts second-order attitudes. sure, i enjoyed that ice cream, but did i feel good about the enjoyment itself?
harry frankfurter approves, and feels good about approving.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:20 am
I think I’d like to make that this blog’s new slogan. Creating magical enjoyment you feel good about since 2002.
Try: Creating magical enjoyment you feel good about sense 2002.
Seems more apt, somehow…
November 21st, 2008 at 10:21 am
“English spoken universally, but not quite right” – -
I think you should make that your blog’s new slogan!
…Bada-BING! You set yourself up for that one.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:22 am
It seems their product is also intended for “The World’s Pleasure Lovers.” But you’d probably get the wrong sort of search-engine traffic if you added that to your masthead.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:25 am
You should try traveling in Asia. Asian people tend plaster English slogans on everything, from appliances to clothing to billboards to cars. And the slogans generally don’t quite work out the way they were intended to.
Once, while traveling between Taichung and Chang Hua in Taiwan, I was passed by a fellow motorcycler, a young man in a leather jacket. In bold letters, the back of his leather jacked said “SISSYBOY”. Oh yeah.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:25 am
Observe the four quadrants of the Magical Enjoyment Space
Consumer Personality
Product Benefit
November 21st, 2008 at 10:35 am
My internet provider here in North Africa advertises its services with this slogan, in English:
“Faster than you want!”
As if anyone in the history of humankind has ever for one second thought that their internet service was too fast, or even faster than it needed to be.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:39 am
You say coincidence. I say reason.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:42 am
Magical Enjoyment We Can Believe In.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:03 am
What’s even _more_ interesting is how this scans to the intended audience: people for whom English is _also_ their second language. The Romans spread Latin all over Europe and then saw it debased into a series of distinct local dialects that are now the Romance languages. Who is to say English spoken by Indians or North Africans won’t develop its own vocabulary and grammar?
November 21st, 2008 at 11:11 am
That little thing called instant global communication.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:16 am
Instant global communication might allow for the existence of a ’standard’ dialect of English (more or less), but I don’t think by itself will have much affect on the existence of regional peculiarities.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:26 am
That is truly awesome.
I hope/fear that we’re crossing into some kind of nihilism apotheosis, where there is nothing to hope for but fear itself and vice-versa.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:28 am
And on a non-linguistic point, why does the graphic look like a toilet seat?
November 21st, 2008 at 11:28 am
“Creating magical enjoyment you feel good about” is pretty much the definition of advertising. Hence the “Brand Essence” above it. Ads create a purely phantasmatic, magical enjoyment that you can feel good about by buying the product.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:29 am
Yes, DCreader — all we need for that to happen is another Dark Age.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:35 am
What makes the Neslte think even funnier is they have a huge in country operation here in the US, and in fact within a few miles of where I sit in the Cleveland area perhaps as many as 1000 or more employees and a huge white color operation as part of it. Heck, 3 days ago they just opened this.
http://www.nestleprofessional.com/united-states/en/Animations/NPCICVideo/NPCIC_VIDEO.html
Is it to much trouble for them to run this stuff by their US staff?
November 21st, 2008 at 11:40 am
it’s an unfortunate coincidence that the world’s lingua franca is also the language that features the greatest proliferation of irregularities and so forth
I’d disagree here and come down on the “feature, not a bug” side. English has been able to become a lingua franca for many reasons but also in no small part because it’s so irregular, which allows it to be flexible, eat up pieces of other languages, etc. There have been many points in the history of various countries – England, the United States, numerous other post-colonial situations – where English been competing with other languages and has by no means been the clear favorite to emerge as the winner. But it has, and so it’s a mess as a result but that mess-ness is both a consequence of its success and a path to further success. Not beautiful, maybe, but incredibly flexible.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:41 am
You know, I do feel good about this magical enjoyment.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:41 am
is also the language that features the greatest proliferation of irregularities and so forth
This is of course not true.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:47 am
English the language with the “greatest proliferation of irregularities and so forth?
Ever tried to learn German or Dutch?
November 21st, 2008 at 11:52 am
Observe the four quadrants of the Magical Enjoyment Space
Consumer Personality
Product Benefit
Notice also that “Personality” is illustrated by an American Indian and an old-time movie star, and “Benefit” by a cowboy (and an Eskimo.) This would seem to suggest that in the process of magical-benefit creation, “personality” is doomed to extinction in the face of the more aggressive power of “benefit.”
I’m not sure about the Eskimo.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:54 am
Actually, this is how marketeers–Anglophone marketers–really speak. It’s exactly how they’d define “brand”, only they don’t usually put it in a slogan like that. “Brand” is actually a very difficult term to define without sounding ridiculous. But it’s a very real thing.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:59 am
Wow, a toilet seat over water with brown lumpy stuff inside. That is an interesting subliminal message. Maybe trying to associate Nestle with a good satisfying dump?
November 21st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Is that a picture of Matt, way back behind the left ear of the little girl in upper left quandrant “consumer?”
November 21st, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Uh oh, I think I’ve been living in France too long, it reads perfectly well for me!
By the way, is there any person around who might be wanting to make some musculation this weekend?
November 21st, 2008 at 12:17 pm
You might enjoy http://www.engrish.com and it’s counterpart http://www.hanzismatter.com. I’m not associated with either site but I enjoy seeing the alternative use of language as decoration. They really create that magical feeling for me
November 21st, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I haven’t had much contact with Dutch. But while German is certainly more complicated than English, I don’t think it’s more irregular–especially when you include the written language, where English has surely the most irregular, bewildering, and nonsensical orthography ever evolved.
What’s intrinsic to English that has helped make it the most widely spoken second language in the world (when I say intrinsic, I mean to leave aside the geopolitical and historical reasons, such as the successive British and American imperia) is the simplicity of the grammar. Leaving aside pronouns, English has neither gender nor case. Adjectives are not declined for gender, case, or number. While there may be a lot of irregular verbs, even so, the inflections are minimal, and there are only two simple tenses, and hardly any verb is irregular in one of them (the present).
To learn a language, not one’s first, to the level of native fluency is probably as hard for one language, including English, as another. But to learn a language to the level of basic communication appears to be easier for English than most others.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
As opposed to “magical enjoyment that you feel cheap and dirty about”?
November 21st, 2008 at 12:48 pm
It’s not a mis translation. It’s corporate writing by committee. The giveaway is the “brand essence” title – this is marketing blather. I’m sure every word was debated throughly by highly paid MBAs. The “compromises” they made are what makes it sound so stilted.
You’d see the same thing in English if you spent any time around marketing types – something I wouldn’t recommend.
November 21st, 2008 at 1:18 pm
How about “Too much magical enjoyment might make you fat”?
November 21st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Re: While there may be a lot of irregular verbs, even so, the inflections are minimal, and there are only two simple tenses, and hardly any verb is irregular in one of them (the present).
English may only have two “simple” tenses, but it has a great many auxiliary tenses (”will”, “would”, “have”, etc.) I’m not certain those are much easier for a foreign speaker.
I’ve tried to explain English grammar to non-Indo-European speakers before, and had a hell of a time doing it. I’m not certain that English verb tenses are much less complex than in other European languages. You have a good point, though, about gender and case.
I don’t think English grammatical simplicity has much to do with why it became a lingua franca. Other languages that have served as regional lingua francas (Russian, Latin, Persian, French, Mandarin, Swahili) did so because of historical and social factors, not because of grammatical simplicity.
November 21st, 2008 at 1:35 pm
English spoken universally, but not quite right
Actually, if English is spoken universally, who gets to decide what is right?
November 21st, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Nestle is evil
November 21st, 2008 at 2:01 pm
I totally agree with Rob Mac. I’m actually shocked to see English spoken not quite right in Switzerland, of all places. Engrish (in China, they generally call in Chinglish) is such a major feature of life in China that I found it inexplicable while teaching there for a year. Although I think my favorite example was actually the confusion between French and English at a store called “Pirate-à-Porter.”
November 21st, 2008 at 2:49 pm
What some commenters above mean by “grammatical simplicity” is some thing like “lack of inflectional morphology” and “lack of agreement” (one aspect of syntax, arguably). English relies on rules of word-ordering and word-clustering (linear precedence and immediate dominance respectively, two other aspects of syntax) to a greater extent than languages like Latin, Sanskrit, or Australian Aboriginal languages, to pseudorandomly pick some examples. Asking whether that makes English more or less complex than those languages is kind of a fool’s game.
As for this, Herschel @31: “to learn a language to the level of basic communication appears to be easier for English”, it’s not clear that than this basic communication is in fact taking place in English. It could be taking place in an English-lexified pidgin. Pidginization gets rid of inflection, no matter what the lexifier. English’s lack of inflection may mean that English-lexified pidgins sound more like English than Spanish-lexified pidgins sound like Spanish, but that does not make those pidgins English.
Note the hedgerow of “arguably”, “kind of”, “not clear”, “could”, and “may” in the above.
[/linguist]
November 21st, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Who is to say English spoken by Indians or North Africans won’t develop its own vocabulary and grammar?
This is already the case with Scandinavians, in my experience. Many often speak nearly native English, but use neologisms derived from original language slang.
It’s also pretty clear that this was taken in the French speaking part of Switzerland where the English skills are substantially worse than in German speaking Switzerland (though not so bad as in Tessin, the Italian speaking county, which may as well be Italy for the total lack of people who know English well).
Interestingly, I found there to be something like “ex-pat” English, which borrowed expressions from North American English, Antipodean English as well as European English, and occasional expressions from South Africans and Scandinavians.
It’s basically a self-flattering myth that English is particularly difficult language to learn. As Herschel mentioned, there are whole categories of grammatical complexity that don’t even exist in English. I don’t think the relative simplicy of English relative to languages like Russian, or even Germanic languages has much to do with it’s global uptake, but it is a happy coincidence for those who learn English as a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th).
November 21st, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I agree with Herschel that the general simplicity of English grammar has facilitated its spread and allowed it to adapt to a wide variety of other linguistic environments. Its grammar is very loose, with many interchangeable “little words” used to supplement the verbs and nouns which contain the force of every sentence. No genders, an exceedingly simple verbal system. A rich and protean vocabulary wherein new words are created very easily. Orthography is indeed a pain, but a language’s written forms don’t really affect much.
Another “global language” of another era, Persian, shares many of the same characteristics. Grammatical simplicity, combined with great syntactical flexibility and an eclectic and rich vocabulary. I hear the same about Mandarin but I wouldn’t know firsthand.
November 21st, 2008 at 4:01 pm
To anyone who thinks English is complex, consider this:
SPANISH
“comer”
Yo como
Tu comes
El/ella come
Nosotros comemos
Vosotros coméis
Ellos/ellas comen
ENGLISH
“eat”
I eat
You eat
He/she eats
We eat
Y’all eat
They eat
November 21st, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I would note also that Japanese has: (i) no gender; (ii) no number, in other words, nouns, adjectives and verbs don’t change for singular vs. plural; (iii) no case markers; (iv) no definite articles or indefinite articles; (v) the infinitive form of the verb usually means future tense rather than present tense.
I’m not sure if that makes it simpler or more complex.
By contrast, Arabic, which I’ve also studied, has every wrinkle you could possibly imagine, and is super hard.
November 21st, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I understand how this distinction is important if you happen to be a linguist. But to the rest of us mere English-speakers, hearing an “English-lexified pidgin” and immediately understanding what the pidgin-speaker means to convey is an experience of English being spoken.
November 21st, 2008 at 7:22 pm
MR got it right.
This blog’s new slogan: Ignoring reality since 2002.
Another one: Suckers for “Big Dog Democrats” since 2002.
Another one: Bending over for Democrats since 2002.
Face it, Matt believed the Clintons and the like when he supported the Iraq war, and now he believes Obama in supporting the Afghanistan war – and he’ll support Obama when he starts a war with Iran.
Where’s the “change we can believe in”? In Matt’s head – he’ll believe anything if somebody higher than him on the Democratic totem pole says it.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:01 pm
First, someone that´s not a Native speaker will not speak a language perfectly well.
What I find interesting is that in English people are less worried with the Grammar and even pronunciation: there is several ways of speaking “Idaho”, “neither”, “Smith”, “Arkansas” and no one cares.
November 22nd, 2008 at 4:10 am
I believe that the promulgation of English as the world’s “lingua franca” is impractical and linguistically undemocratic. I say this as a native English speaker.
Impractical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. That is the position of English at the momen because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages. Even Mandarin Chinese is attempting to dominate as well. The long-term solution must be found and a non-national language, which places all ethnic languages on an equal footing is essential.
An interesting video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:45 am
English is not difficult to learn. It is difficult to master. The same is true of any language.
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:46 am
I see someone has already mentioned Esperanto. Don’t underestimate this planned language. It has a bright future as a second language for international relations – and advertising. It lacks the irrgularities present in Spanish, Arabic – and English.
Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net
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