#1063 Advance Ad-vice

So the other day I was walking around a development of the fairly well-to-do. As I walked, I began to notice this unusual thing in the middle of the entrance to each house’s driveway. It was placed precisely in the middle too, as if the placer had been anxious to distinguish it from a random piece of litter.
But still, litter it was. My mind began to run through the rage cycle associated with the weekly abomination from our local paper that they hurl into my yard each week and that I am then forced to recycle and remove. The Hot Ticket perpetrators still annoy me, and by extension, the folks that advertise in their monstrosity. What is the difference between their rolled up newspaper ad and litter?
Nothing. At least the mailbox stuffers pay to place their stuff.
Advertising rule number one: Don’t annoy the potential customer.
The colors on the rolled up thing looked not unlike those I associate with Watchtower, so I first thought it was a new missionary missive method for the Jehovah Witnesses. Perhaps actually ringing doorbells got too dangerous, especially for the children they often drag around with them to witness the process.
I finally picked one up from the driveway of a large three-story home with pillars and natural rock and other luxury accouterments. And it turned out to be something I never would have expected—A brochure for Advance America Check Cashing Services.
Now here’s the thing. The person that did this also included her card in the brochure. She also rolled each brochure neatly and secured it with a multiply-looped rubber band. Then she went all over this neighborhood precisely placing these things in the middle of each driveway entrance.
All that time and effort—for the wrong target customer. The thrust of the brochure was they were targeting people who had trouble handling a checking account. Had she looked at the homes at the end of each driveway she was littering, she may have deduced the owners managed money okay.
Advertising rule number 2: If you’re going to personalize your ad distribution, make sure it’s to the right person.
America, ya gotta love it.

#1062 Potty

You reach an age where you hear someone say something you yourself have said for years, or you remember hearing first when you were a child, and you ask yourself, why do we say that?
Like did you ever notice that we have cheesecake and various types of meat pies, but we never have meat cake? It’s not that many things don’t qualify as being cake, like kidney pie and shepherd’s pie, it’s just that we never call it cake if it’s associated with meat. Hamburger cake? Nope, hamburger pie.
Beefcake? Well...only if the chefs are named Chip and Dale.
So the other day when I heard a lady asking her three-year-old if she wanted to “go potty” I started to wonder. “Go potty.” It doesn’t even get the grammar right. Go to the potty.
I think the toddler is capable of understanding the correct way to say it. You don’t say to your child, “Do you want to go grandma?” “Do you want to go store?”
But you do say, “Do you want to go play?” So maybe the “go potty” means potty is the act itself, not the pot you do it in. The pot is not the potty, the potty is the action in the pot.
Then “go potty” makes more grammatical sense. So by extension, other phrases could reflect both a thing’s objective quality and the action performed upon them. Instead of using the lawn mower to cut the lawn, I could “go lawnmower.” Instead of walking through a door, I could “go door.” Politicians go “doorbelling” so there’s some precedent for this.
And instead of getting in my car and going driving I can now simply “go car.” Which sounds more fun because it sounds like a go-cart.
“I like it when we go car like this, Honey”
“Me too, by the way, turn here, we need to go store. I want to buy some new pots so we can go crabby.”
“That reminds me, I have to go potty.”
“Not here on the side of the road, that’s illegal.”
“But Honey, it’s like the song says, ‘We need to fight, for the right, to potty...’”
America, ya gotta love it.

#1061 Eentsy Bitsy 2

The other day I did a commentary about the Little People wanting to have the word midget banned by the FCC. They Compared the M-word to the N-word.
And it got me thinking about small words. Especially because I had recently done a crossword puzzle and the answer to the clue was eensy. That’s e-e-n-s-y-. Now when I was growing up, it was always eentsy with a T. Or eentsy-weentsy, both with a T. My thesaurus suggester on my Word program fails to mention eensy either way, but does offer as a synonym for “midget” the word teensy.
It also offers the variation teensy-weensy and teeny-weeny. A phrase I’m guessing the little people would object to even more.
Then there’s the banana bana bo bana crowd who have to have everything with a B. They favor eentsy beentsy. Which sounds an awful like some kind of soup creation, using really small beans, or lentils perhaps. Eentsy beantsy.
Or perhaps it’s a carryover from itsy bitsy. Of the spider and the waterspout legend. Depending on your daycare or nursery school, you could have ended up with spiders that were eensy-weensy, eentsy- beentsy, or itsy bitsy. Interestingly, perhaps because a spider image calls for an “S”, you never hear of an itty-bitty spider.
And although we have eentsy-beentsy and eenstsy-weentsy we don’t have a comparable itsy-bitsy and itsy-witsy.
And what is an itty bitty anyhow? Sounds like some kind of slam against a Little-wittle old person—that old bitty, that old itty bitty.
So what I’m saying is, if we have to start redefining which words we use for “small” we could be opening up a can of worms here.
By the way, vivid images aside, have you ever seen a can of worms? Itsy bitsy or otherwise? How do worms survive the boiling hot canning process? And if they do, do fish think a canned worm is every bit as flavorful as the fresh-picked variety?
That’s just one of those little itty bitty thoughts that go worming piggley-wiggley through my brain.
America, ya gotta love it.