Recall how on October 3, 2011 I wrote about how advertisers try to get us to change our vocabulary. I’m not talking about political correctness. Rather, this is an attempt to change the way we think, to make certain products or activities seem more attractive. Examples included realtors, seemingly successful in changing the word houses to homes, which sounds much warmer, friendlier and more personal; and car dealers, somewhat less successful in rebranding used cars as previously owned. Here are a few more examples that I noticed over the past six months.
One example is the use of expressions gaming and gambling. Basically, gaming is legal, gambling is not, but they are really the same activity, risking money to win more. When it happens at a casino or takes the form of a lottery run by the state, it’s called gaming and it’s OK. If it’s an office football pool, it’s gambling and not OK.
Ironically, in the 10x10 matrix used in the office pool, you pay $1 for a 1 in 100 chance to win $100. In a pick-3 type state lottery, you pay $1 for a 1 in 1000 chance to win $500. The office pool is a smarter bet by a factor of two, in fact the probability of winning is superior to any legalized game!
Another advertising ploy is to label products as “chemical-free,” supposedly meaning safe or pure. The concept of chemical-free is an impossibility, since all matter from stars to mother’s milk is made from either a single chemical element or chemical compound or some mixture of both. Yet many cleaning items, for example, make ample use of this expression.
Critical thinkers know that when you go back to the dictionary definitions, we all live in houses, use chemicals for good and bad purposes, and gamble whenever we place a bet to win money. They are not influenced by advertisers’ clever use of euphemistic or manipulative wording.
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