In Advertising Land, parts of speech move freely across borders. Nouns become verbs (“Prepare to Pumpkin,” “Let’s Movie”); adjectives become nouns (“Welcome to Possible,” “The Power of True”). This functional shift, or anthimeria, happens in regular English, too – share and contact were nouns long before they were verbs – but it’s downright rampant in ad copy, as these recent sightings demonstrate.
Adjective to noun: “Extraordinary commits entirely’'; Cole Haan ad, New York Times, September 14, 2017.
Having gone to the trouble of reading “extraordinary” as a noun, I find myself doing the same to “entirely”—as if it were a kind of crime.
— Q. Pheevr (@qpheevr) September 14, 2017
I’d add that the only extraordinary I see in that ad is the ugliness of the outfit, which probably costs a couple months’ salary.
Verb to noun: “Find Your Thrive,” Executive Women International, based in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. (Via Matt Gordon.)
Found it!
Comparative adjective to noun: “We believe in better”; Barbara’s “wholesome cereals and snacks” xince 1971. (Via Ben Yagoda, who is as obsessed with this trend as I am.)
Comparative adjective to noun: “What’s Your Greater/Achieve Greater”; Northern Trust Bank.
Adjective to noun: “Pretty Shouldn’t Stink,” outdoor ad for “healthy nail salons” from SFEnvironment, a department of the city and county of San Francisco.
Adjective/comparative adjectives to nouns: “Reboot Your Normal”; “Discover Bolder, Tastier, Crunchier.” Spotted in the UK by Ben Yagoda.
Sometimes plain old functional shift isn’t oomph-y enough. So you do with United did: attach a verbifying suffix, -ify, to an adjective.
This ad reminded me of two things: first, that names ending in -ify have been so trendy for so long that my colleague The Name Inspector created a Wall of Namifying to immortalize them. And second, unstopify made me think of the P-deprived Unstopables brand from Procter & Gamble, which I wrote about back in 2011 (scroll down).
LOL Cole Haan—"Give me a full ballerina skirt and a hint of saloon and I'm on board."
Posted by: maria | September 15, 2017 at 01:38 PM
I shared this with a friend, who immediately thought of the mangled English that shows up in Japan.
Specifically, she was thinking of the 1980s band Let's Active, who apparently got their name from a Japanese t-shirt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Active
Posted by: Scott Underwood | September 20, 2017 at 07:31 AM
In the case of demonstratives used as adjectives, the first letter of the noun the demonstrative is accompanying.
Posted by: Adjective Definition | September 28, 2017 at 07:27 AM