Wednesday 19 May 2004

Our Fish Tastes Quite Nice

There has always been a variety of styles in advertising. A hundred years ago approaches ranged from the forthright, where you were told "Take Brown's Tincture Or You Will Die", to the euphemistically genteel, where a dress shop might offer "Inexpensive Models For The Maturer Figure" when they really meant "Cheap Clothes For Fat Old Women".

Nowadays, the range is from the subtle and incomprehensible (e.g. many TV commercials...."What was that one all about?") to the terse and often pointless. One retailer has become the biggest in the country with the help of an extremely feeble slogan displayed throughout their stores, sometimes inappropriately:

2 comments:

Jamie said...

What is a tincture?

Tony said...

A tincture is an alcoholic solution of some herb or vegetable, used in medicine. The late Denis Thatcher the old bat's husband), a noted drunk, used it as a synonym for booze, as in "While Maggie's out, join me in my study for a small tincture".