You talkin' to me?
Or you got some other reason for tryin' the G-droppin'* thing on your 1A lede story today?Really. I have a hard time figurin' out where you're goin' with this one. Just demonstratin' how hip you are? Or remindin' us that any news event can conjure up some kind of advertisin' campaign? Or tryin' to take our minds off all the people you're libelin' on the inside pages?
If you're hopin' to connect with your readers, you missed a lot of opportunities right on the homepage:
Relief for interstate traffic: Drivin' on shoulders
Jesse Helms recalled as carin' man
One drowns in Neuse River, one missin'
Man pleads guilty in beatin' death
Report: Evergreen CEO retirin'
Really. If you want grownups to keep readin' the paper, how about cuttin' this stuff out?
* Just kiddin', linguists! "G-droppin'" is a popular but not entirely accurate term, though it certainly makes visual sense.** People who have this speech feature (quite a few of us in American English, under some circumstances) aren't really reducin' a consonant cluster. They're substitutin' one consonant ("n") for another ("engma," represented by "ng").
** And gets irritatin' in a big f***in' hurry.
posted by fev at 10:18 AM
7 Comments:
I would imagine they think they're referring to some catchphrase - maybe the Energizer Bunny? But it's very annoyin', you're right.
Bunny's my first guess. Unfortunately, I don't have him on tape (real oversight, considerin' his role in my academic career), but -- does he really drop the G? Inquirin' minds and all that.
I agree they were going for the bunny, but the commercials all have a pronounced G in the best professional announcer diction.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=n_oqJa1v5K4&feature=related
Thanks, Brian. Considering how often I visited YouTube the last two months looking for cool media-history stuff to teach, I'm embarrassed that I forgot to check there. Evidently the clue furnace needs cleaning before winter.
But if you need a link to the first-ever advert on British TV, just let me know ...
Brian's right - which is why I said "they think" they're referring to the Bunny.
Indeed, indeed -- which still leaves the question of why they thought it, or how well they related what they thought they remembered to what they ended up rendering.
That last consonant isn't what stands out when you think about the ad campaign, right? It's the "keep going, and going, and going." Trouble is, then you need to add at least one line:
keep going
and going
... and it looks as if "keep going" wouldn't even fit in the spex as given.
I'd like to think at this point that somebody would decide the bunny is the wrong hed idea for this story and these hed spex. And perhaps that this story isn't the right one for a strongly vertical hard-news hed. But now we're tromping on other desks' territory.
Reminds me - every time a new edition of The Oxford American arrives in the mail, I feel like the motto should be written: The Magazine of Good Writin'
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