#19 Ad-jectives

Hand-crafted and home-baked pizza. These are the words that were deeply intoned from my radio as I drove home last evening. Sounds good, I thought, I’m hungry, I think I’ll pick one up. And then the significance of the phrase trickled into the dark recesses of my brain. Wait a minute. Hand-crafted is all well and good, but home-baked means I gotta cook it. No way! In case you haven’t noticed, the deep recesses of my brain is where my primitive caveman-slash-teenager lives. And he’s one lazy son-of-a-gun. But boy, they made that pizza sound good. And that seems to be the Madison Avenue trend these days. The 21st century is all about more words, not fewer. “Hand-crafted home-baked” has replaced “take-n-bake.”
I saw another example of this at my local gym. Excuse me, health and fitness center. I go in the shower and they have these dispensers on the wall the squirt out liquid soap. Not any more. Now they squirt out “Luxury Foam Hair and Body Wash.” I was amazed. I mean, I go to a cheap club, and this stuff sounded pretty hoity-toity to me. Luxury Foam Hair and Body Wash. I thought maybe I’d wandered into the ladies shower by mistake. A quick glance at the visible plumbing indicated that I was indeed in the men’s shower but I still felt a little shiver. I quickly figured out why. It took so long to read the dang dispenser, I’d run out of hot water. I told you my club was cheap.
I don’t know about you, but instead of visiting a health and fitness center with Luxury Foam Hair and Body Wash, I’d rather go to a gym with soap—if it meant I could have more hot water. I’d even take plain water, it wouldn’t have to be super-heated spring-fed cold-filtered gently-softened mineral-enhanced water either. Just plain old warm wet stuff.
Those quicker than me have no doubt realized right away what’s hiding in the phrase Luxury Foam Hair and Body Wash: The word “foam.” Foam, as the astute among you know, is mostly air. Luxury foam is even more air. More air means less soap. And therefore less money for my dear old club to fork over to the supplier.
Like I say, cheap.
But there’s another reason the luxury foam seemed a little absurd. I mean, my lazy inner self may balk at baking his own pizza, but really, I’m in a gym for gosh sake. I can certainly expend enough effort to make my own lather.
America, ya gotta love it.