A San Diego, California, listener has observed that some advertising slogans that omit the part of speech known as an article, such as Get iPhone 14 Pro or Do what’s best for Baby. The phrasing is intentional. Advertising often relies on a compressed, headline-like style for speed and brevity, and because it treats a product name as if it were unique, almost like a proper noun. Removing articles creates a sleeker rhythm and positions the item as iconic rather than ordinary, so iPhone or Baby in these phrases feels elevated and universal rather than tied to a single unit or child. In the 1938 film Bringing Up Baby, the Baby being brought up is a leopard. Geoffrey Leech’s 1966 book English in Advertisingaddresses this topic This is part of a complete episode.
In Hong Kong English, Add oil! means something like “Go on!” or “Go for it!” A recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary, this expression of encouragement comes from Cantonese (加油 or gā yáu; rendered as jiāyóu from Mandarin) and draws on the...
A Green Bay Packers fan wonders why a quarterback who’s tackled is said to be sacked. The roots of the word sack as in “bag” goes back thousands of years, all the way to Akkadian, later spreading through Greek, Latin, and then to Romance and...
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