The new EEE PC netbook is "one inch thin." Yesterday, a woman at a cafe downtown told the wage rat behind the counter that she's "54 years young." "54 years younger than what?!" I asked her. I don't think she saw the humor in it. Seriously, who decided it was clever to use inverted adjectives like that? Adjectives describe objects -- "one inch thick" means it's thicker than no inches thick. "54 years old" means the woman's 54 years older than zero years old. The only purpose I can see behind this trend is to invite people to mislead themselves, an implicit request from one person of the other to allow the former to lie to the latter, couched in an insincere verbal shit-eating grin. Discuss!
McDonalds sells double-guarter pounders, because "double-quarter" sounds bigger than "half." And I've seen at least one store that labels their plus-size clothing sections as "above average," as though being fat enough to need special clothes is some sort of accomplishment now.
Hmmm. So it's not a "receding hairline" -- it's an "advancing forehead." Female cancer patients will no longer have mastectomies, they'll benefit from "unconventional weight loss." Your car will no longer be low on gas, it will henceforth "become oxygen-rich." The trend is so disgusting I could [-]puke[/-] contribute to the menu.
Semantics are the path to the dark side of psychology: advertising. Psychology is the study of the mind's workings and behavior; and should be used to help and further people along their path. Counseling, behavior research, even corporate consulting does this well. Psychology is just about the last magic left to us in the world today, and it should be employed responsibly and with care. Advertising takes the beauty of the human mind and turns it on the subject, rewrites their schema and implants ideas not their own through subtle and devious tricks of the subconscious mind. Modern advertising was developed by a psychologist who experimented on babies to make them afraid of white, furry things. By ringing a gong next to the baby's head whenever a cat got near him. There is no darker art in hell or the human mind than to pervert the true art and goals of psychology, and advertisers (aside from any here) can go suck it.
The adjectives in question here -- "thick" "thin" "young" and "old" -- actually make comparisons between objects. They only make sense relative to a similar object or to some accepted standard. Age is a good example. To a 10 year old 25 is "old," while to a 60 year old 25 is "young." Each of those adjectives describes a person's age relative to that of the speaker, and each is therefore correct. Age words can also change depending on the creature being described. 5 years is old for a guinea pig but young for a horse. 90 years is old for a human but young for a redwood tree. You get the idea. The fact that we usually say "years old" when referring to age is really just a convention of the English language, and therefore eligible to be subverted. If someone wants to emphasize youth, or thinness, or other qualities seen as desirable, exchanging the word commonly used for its antonym seems like an effective way of doing so.
Once a Spanish speaking friend of mine asked why in English people were referred to as twenty years old, or thirty years old. I explained that it was a figure of speech that basically meant "of age." To think of it as somebody being twenty years of age, or thirty years of age. But he was right, old isn't the correct term, conversely young is just as incorrect. So god bless folks who use the two interchangeably.
A cup IS either half full or half empty Its not either one depending on how optimistic you are A cup is half full if you half way through the process of filling it, and a cup is half empty if you are half way through drinking the fecking thing (or tipping it out or whatever...)
Ah, but what if you're filling it up to the brim so that it's not empty at all, and someone asks "Have you gotten that filled up yet?" and you answer "No, it's still half-empty."
I'd hope so, since that very idea was the very basis of my opening rant. Except it's not. If there is no point of reference against which to base "young", the default point of reference is the subject's own beginning state, which is "zero x old." That's why years old became a convention in the first place. Mainly it just seems like a patently dishonest one, to me at least.
At JCPenney, plus sizes are just called "women's." Because if you're female and wear anything smaller than a 1X, you're apparently not a woman, you're a "miss," a "junior," or a "petite."
Is there something inherently honest about saying "old" instead of "young," or "thick" instead of "thin?" Or is it that there's something inherently honest about adhering to convention?
The word with the greater numerical value generally expresses a quantity, whereas that word's inverse generally does not. For instance, an object with no dimensions would have a thickness, depth and height of zero. Those are the only words needed, because thickness, depth and height can define ALL possible dimensions, from zero to infinity. Trying to define an object by thinness, shallowness and shortness doesn't make sense. Thinness, shortness, youth, etc., all express having a lesser amount of whatever is measured by their inverses. They are not, themselves, measurements.
