Transcript of “Ads Eschew Articles”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Shannon. I’m calling from San Diego.
Shannon, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind?
So I’ve been wondering about something that I’ve been seeing over the past couple years. But I especially saw it sort of really get on my radar, I’d say about three, four years ago. And that’s advertising language that doesn’t use articles.
So I’ve seen ads a lot of the times from like mobile carriers where they’ll say, instead of get the new iPhone 14 Pro, they’ll say get iPhone 14 Pro. Or in the case of baby formula and diaper companies, they’ll say do what’s best for baby rather than do what’s best for your baby. And I’ve been wondering, why is that?
Because it feels like something that’s deliberate, but at the same time, I don’t see the benefit of it because it seems a little odd from the way we normally talk to one another.
It’s definitely a thing. Get iPhone and Best for Baby both have different paths that we can wander down. But I want to talk about Best for Baby for a minute because it instantly reminds me of the 1938 film called Bringing Up Baby. And it’s a comedy by Howard Hawks that stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Although Baby is a leopard in the film, you know, the large feline, it still is using Baby in the way that you’re talking about without an article in front of it, without an indirect or direct article. This gives us like a date that we can work with. So we know that at least by 1938, using baby in this way was already a thing.
But in the larger realm of advertising to drop the articles, to say something like get iPhone, you know, get iPhone 17, the marketing people, the rationale there is to change the style so it seems more archetypal and elevated. It’s kind of a form of headline ease.
That’s the language used in the news media to summarize a story in a headline or subheadline, but it omits verbs, omits prepositions, omits articles, and gives a sense of immediacy and directness. And if headlines are well written in this way, even though you’ve dropped those parts of speech, there’s still a huge amount of information per word.
So are you with me? Are you following here?
No, I’m following what you’re saying. Because my thinking with that rationale was maybe they was trying to make it seem more, I guess, like special, as in like a proper name.
Yeah. Like either dress me or you, you know. But I didn’t consider that, what you were mentioning of maybe making it still, like, it still gets the information across without needing the extra language.
Yeah, so of course this has been studied. Jeffrey Leach wrote a book that was published in 1966 called English in Advertising. And he talked about something called the particularity of reference. And what he means is that although there are tens of millions of iPhones in the world, you know, it’s a hugely successful product. The product is treated as if it were unique, as if each unit is a special unicorn.
Like the one you had before you in your hand is an extraordinary, unique device. And sometimes you can do it by including the definite article saying the iPhone. But you do it without the article, as you noticed, by limiting them altogether so that the product stands alone. It kind of is raised up into this universe of products like I’m going to school, you know, I go to church. It’s kind of as if this is a fundamental force in our civilization, in our culture.
IPhone, not the iPhone, but iPhone. Like the platonic form. Yeah, there has been so much written on the use of language and advertising. But the key to what you noticed, and you did notice something important, is that advertising doesn’t use regular everyday English. It uses its own form of English with different goals and with a kind of necessary conciseness.
And sometimes, in order to stand out, people break rules. This is not a rule break so much as just a consistent behavior that we wouldn’t do in everyday language. Shannon, thank you so much for calling our attention to this particular practice. We appreciate it.
Of course, and thank you for having me.
All right. Take care now. Bye-bye.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, we appreciate it when you listen closely to advertising and media and bring us your thoughts about it.
