At a morphological level, we have manipulations such as in a Nissan advertisement for a 4x4, flatbed truck. Over the words, "To sport," we see a very flashy, well-equipped, black Nissan 4x4 ST. Below this, occupying the lower half of the frame, is the same flatbed now loaded with a flashy yellow motorcycle and yellow-shirted motorcyclist/driver. This is above the words, "Or transport." Note that this is to be considered more properly as a morpho-phonological manipulation in that the viewer/reader experiences the similar sound of the "sport/transport" alternation as well as the necessity to re-form (morphologically) the word "transport" to conform with the word "sport." Moreover, note that this is an allusion to the Shakespearean "To be or not to be," but that this is more of a veiled imperative than it is syntactically a rhetorical question begging of a decision. The message conveyed must be construed as something like: "Here is the ultimate in sporty automobiles for you. Not only is it sporty but it will transport whatever you need or want and it will never lose its allure. Therefore, if you want to be the best, purchase the best!"
Another type of morphological manipulation is the pairing of a morpheme with a nongrammatical counterpart or the creation of a pseudo-morpheme [13; 32]. In the case of the former, one is immediately reminded of the Seven-Up Corporation's eminently successful "uncola" ads in which the negative morpheme "un-" was paired with a noun rather than an expected adjective. Clearly, we were not talking of "Coke" here! In the case of the latter, we have as an example the GTE Phone Mart ad which depicts products from the store with the words, "How to keep up with the phoneses." This pseudo-morpheme then calls to mind the spelling and pronunciation of the Joneses and the newly-created, phrasal pseudo-idiom sends the message: "If you want to be at the same socio-economic level as all your friends and neighbors, purchase your phones at our store." In both cases, this purposeful rule-bending and -breaking rivets the viewer/reader's attention and conveys definitive and clear-cut messages regarding the "rightness" of purchasing the particular advertised products.
At the lexical level, punning is at a premium. In an ad for Dexter shoes, we have a picture of a Dexter shoe worn by a foot and leg in a jean on one side and the same Dexter shoe worn by a foot and leg in a dress pant on the other. The word below says it all: "Ambidexters." The fortuitous similarity of the company's name is capitalized upon to achieve a manipulation over the word "ambidextrous." Although at first blush this seems only a lexical manipulation, as I have pointed out before, this is virtually impossible. The pronunciation of the word hinges, of course, on the breaking and reforming of sound rules as well [24; 82].
Lexcial manipulations are often puns over well-known, bound idioms [10; 79]. We have examples such as the Brooks ad for its running shoes ("Roads Scholar."), the Levi-Strauss advertisement for its painted denims ("Painted Denims. Strokes of Levi's Jeanius."), the Holland-America Trans-Canal ad for its less-expensive voyage across the Isthmus ("Connect the docks and save $600."), the Nissan "Feel your Pulsar quicken." ad, or the Martini & Rossi vermouth quip: "Martini & Rossi. In a glass by itself." These all constitute manipulations at the levels of sound and spelling, "roads/Rhodes," "genius/jeanius," "docks/dots," "pulse/Pulsar," "glass/class" which lead immediately to manipulations at the level of bound idiom: a Rhodes scholar, a stroke of genius, connect the dots, feel your pulse quicken, in a class by itself.
This in turns leads, semiotically, to our messages:If one buys Brooks's shoes, one becomes an expert in running on the roads; the idea of painted/colored jeans is a stroke of genius and one who wears them will be a fashion "genius"; one need only look at the map, connect the dots leading to the dock where one embarks and the dock where one debarks to see how one is getting a good bargain in traveling with Holland-America across the Isthmus of Panama; if one drives a Nissan Pulsar, one will be excited - one's pulse will quicken because it is an exciting car; if one drinks Martini & Rossi vermouth, one will be drinking a product which is incomparable to others.
Sometimes, a lexical manipulation may be achieved by capitalizing on the meaning of a foreign word which happens to be part of the advertisement. A particularly poignant example is Goodyear's depiction of its tires on a Pontiac Fiero: "Fiero means 'proud," performance means Eagles." Here, a pseudo-definition is concocted out of the fortuitous pairing of the foreign-named car with the advertised Goodyear tires. Out of this, the viewer/reader get notions of "proud performance = Eagles," a rather neat, albeit somewhat bogus, formulation.
Almost all syntactic manipulation emerges directly from lexical manipulation. The psychological term, "alter ego," supports the manipulation sententially of "Alter your ego." in an advertisement by Chevrolet for the purchase of its Celebrity Eurosprt car. "Moosehead Beer stands head and antlers above the rest" is the manipulation of the sentential idiom "One stands head and shoulders above the rest." Smithsonian magazine tells readers that "The F-Stops Here." an allusion to the wonderful and qwuality pictures that are a hallmark of the magazine and a clear alteration of the sentential, well-known bound idiom: "The buck stops here." (In this same ad which depicts a huge lens, Smithsonian also quips in tiny letters in the lower right corner: "2,000,000 subscribers put their money where their minds are.") Maxell Gold disks are proclaimed as "The floppy disk that turns Apples golden, keeps AT&T on-line, and makes every Texas Instrument a gusher." This multiple idiomed, multiple-allusioned advertisement contains manipulations at the morphological, lexical, idiomatic, historical, environmental, referential, and syntactic levels.
There is more. Again at the level of sentential manipulation, Nissan tells us that a Nissan Sentra XE going uphill in the photo implies that you must "Make the grade, no matter what course you take." An ad for Palm Springs, California, with all of its sights, relaxations, and refreshments, depicts a beautiful woman in a bathing suit lying on a floating mat in a pool with the appropriate and requisite male at her side. The caption tells us that "In times like these, you need times like these." A Seagram's Gin bottle poses as the letter "I" in between two gold letters, "G" and "N" with the caption: Seagram's Gin makes your screwdriver letter perfect." This is a somewhat long-winded sentential extension of the well-known bound idiom, but it seems to achieve its rhetorical purpose [27; 313].
Up to this point, we have avoided several ads in my collection which manipulate in much the same way as the above but have the additional dubious feature of being exploitative in a way that is, in my opinon, somewhat noxious. Of course, all advertisements exploit in the sense of wanting to convey the impression of the "rightness" of the product or service advertised. These ads, however, are different in that they typically contain manipulations aimed at the sexual appetite of the viewer/reader. Most often, but not always, the target is the American, purportedly to-be-dominated-and-therefore-to-be-exploited female.
While it is clear that in a society and culture which makes a regualr habit, nay a ritual, out of being titillated sexually, advertisers in that society can be expected to attempt to capitalize on that tendency, one can hardly find a reason for necessarily condoning such manipulation. It is not my purpose to discuss it at length here. It is, indeed, the subject of an entirely different piece. I merely present a few examples for your interest and understanding:
Shofar kosher frankfurters and salamis depicts a very shapely female posterior in a pair of almost revealing cut-off jeans. A package of Shofar kosher midget salami is crammed in one back pocket. The ad is titled "Little Nosh." [Yiddish for "a little something to eat]. Suffice it to say that "salami" has a phallic connotation in the popular culture and let your imagination do the rest!
In a milder yet equally exploitative fashion, Sassafras swimwear presents a photo of four very comely young ladies all dressed in fashionable, not particularly risque', swimwear. However, they are all posed full length, from the rear. The title of the advertisement is "Beach bums," an obvious allusion to the posteriors as well as to the well-known bound idiom. Solorflex somewhat less mildly or subtley exploits males by depicting the very well-muscled and proportioned Ken Norton with the linguistic manipulation: "A hard man is good to find." Lastly, an ad that drew so much criticism a few years back that it was eventually pulled: the Canadian Black Velvet whiskey bottle is placed under a very comely young woman in a strapless, black-velvet evening gown. The caption, "Feel the Velvet Canadian" is placed over the figure in such a way that the words, "feel the," are squarely over her breasts. The seeming message: "If we men [and men as potential purchasers are the obvious target of the ads] would but purchase the whiskey, we may vicariously experience this woman's breasts." Again, this is a very clever linguistic manipulation at the lexical and syntactic level. It is however, a poignantly exploitative and noxious example of the kind of semiosis American advertising as an institution could well do without.
Thus, if we analyze the language of commercials, we will clearly see how important is the use of idioms in advertisement. Advertising occupies a central position in the landscape of consumer culture. Advertisers commit major resources to finding out how the purchase of a product could fulfill consumer needs and desires - which may or may not have anything to do with the product's purpose. While advertising's immediate goal may be the promotion of a specific item, its legacy is a standard of values and behavior, which have made advertising copy into idiomatic expressions.
Here we will analyze an extended idiom. Extended idioms were described in the introduction as being featured in their original form together with an additional piece of text that somehow makes a comment on the idiom itself. This comment is often fairly concise and occurs in direct proximity to the idiom, either directly preceding or immediately following it. The main effect provided by the comment is to draw attention to the literal meaning of the idiom.
Burn the candle at both ends, then get rid of the smoke
This extended idiom is found in an ad for a product by Comfort called Refresh, which is sprayed onto clothes to remove smells, or as the slogan promises, it “puts freshness back into clothes”. The entire background of the ad consists of a picture of a woman wearing a dress and a cardigan, but it seems to have been cut in two pieces, with the left half showing her at night in a dark and smoky room, her hair slightly disheveled and her cardigan flailing open, revealing the straps of her dress. In the right-hand half of the picture it is daytime, she standing in a brightly lit room with a desk and a computer visible in the background. Her hair has been combed and her cardigan is neatly adjusted. The woman is holding a spray bottle of Comfort Refresh in her left hand, spraying its contents towards the smoky left-hand half of the picture. The idiom itself, burn the candle at both ends, is written across the smoky half of the picture, while the comment, then get rid of the smoke, is superimposed on the other side. The idiom is partly motivated by conceptual metaphor(s), but it is also possible that conventional knowledge plays a part in forming mental images, at least for some speakers. According to Szabó, the underlying metaphor behind this idiom is energy is fuel for the fire, but it is unclear exactly what they mean and they fail to give a more detailed analysis. Presumably, if we understand energy in terms of fuel for a fire, it means that we need energy to keep the fire burning, in this context perhaps the fire of life. My attempt at an explanation would be that if we burn the candle at both ends, i.e. use up too much energy late at night and early in the morning, there will not be enough left.
Nighttime is when we recuperate and gather more energy, and if that time is cut short there will be no fuel for the fire. However, is it not possible that some other metaphor is involved as well, one that involves time rather than fuel for a fire? One very common metaphor we use in order to understand time is by seeing it as a physical object, sometimes more specifically as a container, which we can move in and out of, as in expressions such as We’re well into the century and He’s like something out of the last century, or as a moving object. In my view, burning the candle at both ends could be partly motivated by this metaphor as well, if we think of a period of time as a bounded entity or slot, that can be shortened at both ends. The candle burning at both ends would then correspond to our night rest being shortened at both ends [24; 90]. Interestingly enough, the reference in this ad is not specifically to the lack of energy that is caused by late nights out and early mornings, but rather it addresses the problems associated with smoky venues and how to feel clean and fresh the next day. The focus is thus not on the short period of rest, but on the short period of time in which you must get your clothes feeling fresh again. What our conventional knowledge tells us, and which could influence our mental images associated with this idiom, is that it is often dark late at night and early in the morning. Being up at these times would therefore require some form of light source, such as a candle, which then would have to be burned at both ends of the day.
Regardless of the exact motivation behind the idiom, it is clear that the element smoke in the comment is grounded both in the literal meaning of the idiom, according to which a candle is burning, and in the wider situation associated with the metaphorical meaning of the idiom, i.e. the knowledge that late nights are associated with going out to smoky bars or clubs, which is information that is partly provided by the picture. Out of context, the idiom would perhaps be difficult to understand, since our attention is drawn to its literal meaning by the comment clause then get rid of the smoke. Gibbs et al., reporting on earlier studies by Gibbs, point out that “people do not ordinarily process the entire literal meanings of idioms,” which often results in a “double-take” when they encounter idioms in a non-metaphorical context [22; 127].
This is clearly what has been exploited by the makers of the ad in question. When reading the idiom burn the candle at both ends, we are more likely to access the metaphorical meaning, which is why we might react when we get to the word smoke, which triggers the literal meaning. This incongruity draws our attention to the underlying metaphorical mappings, and allows us to access the input spaces. The source domain object/fuel is elaborated as a candle space, which contains the candle, the process of burning, and the smoke, or perhaps rather soot, that results from it. The target domain time/energy is instead elaborated as a nightlife space, in which a person stays out late, frequents venues where people smoke cigarettes, and as a result end up with clothes that smell of smoke.
In the headline, which may be understood as a conceptual blend, both these spaces are activated at the same time, and a humorous effect is created by the double literal interpretation of the element ‘smoke’ against both the inputs.
This makes this example similar to the double grounding constellation proposed by Feyaerts and Brône (in press), and it might also be argued that there is metonymic tightening in the blend, since the smoke stands for the previous night out on the town. In that input space, the smoke was one element among others, while in the blend it represents all the others, and in fact forms the evidence that has to be removed.
А good example of an altered idiom in commercial is following:
Comfort is in the eye of the beholder
This ad one for Focus contact lenses, which appeared in Marie Claire in March, 1997. The main part of the ad is taken up by a picture of a woman dressed in a white knitted polo jumper, cuddling a fluffy toy animal that might be a teddy bear. The headline above the picture is written in white against a green background and reads Comfort is in the eye of the beholder, a variant form of the idiomatic expression or proverb Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As with the previous ad, the headline is ambiguous and may be interpreted both literally and metaphorically. Again, the fact that the idiom has been altered triggers the otherwise non-salient literal meaning, but perhaps not as strongly as in the previous ad, since Comfort is in the eye of the beholder may actually be understood in an entirely metaphorical sense, as opposed to Don’t get your panty liners in a twist, where a literal interpretation is inevitably highlighted.