In a rather breathless 2015 podcast from the Pod Academy I talk around the subject of slang…
slang
ADVERTISING LANGUAGE
How brands get it wrong – and occasionally right: an article from 2015…
THE WORD ON THE STREET? ADVERTISERS SHOULD MIND THEIR LANGUAGE IF THEY WANT TO CONNECT
Aiming at the widest possible audience means, logically enough, that advertising usually goes for the most accessible kind of language. It’s when it doesn’t do this, and heads off-piste towards the wilder realms of slang, text-speak or dialect that especially interests a linguist like me. Some recent examples show how a focus on language can work when it’s done judiciously and targeted properly. Honda’s speed-reading captions (‘Keep pushing and get to better faster.’) that go with the slogan ‘Keep Up’ have drawn admiring comments from its target audience. The ad uses highly conversational catchphrases rather than street slang and challenges viewers to keep pace with its high-speed delivery.
The Royal Navy’s latest recruitment ads feature a voiceover in strong Geordie accent, colloquial phrases like ‘up my game’, but work since their fictional speaker looks and sounds authentic, not condescending or trying too hard. Adidas, too, gets it right with its ‘haters’ ad: hiphop beats and street catchphrases like ‘take you out’, ‘score all the girls’ delivered in a multi-ethnic accent go with a message – haters will envy you, but you don’t care – that a youngish demographic is sure to embrace. Using both slang and hashtag Money Supermarket’s #epic strut car insurance campaign works because the visuals – hapless Dave struts his stuff in hotpants and heels – are so silly you fall for it. Soundtrack is once again hiphop, but street-speak is kept to the bare minimum ‘Dave feels epic.’
Other recent attempts to combine funky speech and street style have prompted mixed reactions. Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign, aimed at empowering women to exercise, featured phrases like ‘feelin like a fox,’ ‘damned right I look hot’ and ‘knackered’ to a soundtrack of Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On. Judging by online comments it impressed many of its target group but was blasted by Guardian feminists for calling women ‘girls’ and focusing on close-ups of flesh.
Perceived ‘bad language’ is still an issue for UK consumers, as witness Booking.com’s 2015 TV and cinema ad, scrutinised by the ASA after it received 2345 complaints that ‘booking’ had been substituted for ‘f***ing’ in its voiceover, ‘…you got it booking right…it doesn’t get any booking better…exactly what you booking needed…’ The ASA ruling cleared the brand of wrongdoing: ‘Although we acknowledged that the placement of the word was redolent of the use of expletives, we noted that the ad did not expressly use any explicit language and therefore concluded that, although some viewers might find the connotation and word-play distasteful, it was unlikely that the ad would cause serious or widespread offence.’ Burger King’s 2010 ‘King Great’ slogan was allowed too, but furniture outlet Sofa King’s ‘Sofa King Low (prices)’ was banned. Lloyds Pharmacy wasn’t sanctioned but upset more than a few London underground commuters in 2013 with its poster campaign picturing a defensive line of uncomfortable-looking footballers above the double-entendre ‘Harder Tackle’. The ads were promoting erectile dysfunction treatment with pills ‘for better keepy-uppie.’
Another travel brand, Expedia this time, tried imitating rhyming slang and regional dialect in a 2012 campaign, provoking derision from professional linguists and not a few consumers, too. A trip to London was described in cringe-making ‘cockney’ as follows; ‘I booked in a Bob Murray so I saved maw bees an oney’ (supposedly translating as ‘I booked in a hurry so I saved more money’). Another ad reported on visiting Dublin in a bizarre attempt at Irish pronunciation; ‘It cast nex ter nuttin an we ad a tap noight oyt.’ What were they thinking?
There have been other campaigns over the years in which using unorthodox language has had mixed results. Tourism Australia’s ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ slogan bombed in the conservative US. Jaguar, in its New Zealand billboard campaign, mystifyingly used the line ‘WTXF?’ to advertise its XF model. The abbreviation was highlighted in city centres across New Zealand and on online banners, presumably to the mystification of the brand’s mainly middle-aged and elderly targets. Jaguar nonetheless insists that the tactic did help to raise its profile in a new market. Back in the UK the official Twitter feed for London’s Victoria Line managed to offend many customers when it used texting slang to apologise for serious delays. Their tweet: ‘Hi all, just a quick chirp to let you know Victoria Line is all good this morning. Soz about yesterday! Hope you’re commute/journey goes well.’ Prompted one customer to tweet back: ‘Soz??? Are you kidding? Soz isn’t an appropriate word when your screwup causes thousands of people to get home from work late.’
In the US, where advertisers pioneered casual speech as in Budweiser’s ‘Whassup?’, McDonald’s ‘I’m Lovin’ It,’ Apple’s ‘Think Creative’ and the Dairy industry’s ‘Got Milk?’, it’s commonplace now to reach out to the youth market by using teen-talk and text-speak in campaigns. Brandwatch this year recorded 17000 recent mentions by brands of the key teen slang terms ‘bae’ (sweetheart) and ‘fleek’ (cool, successful), among them Taco Bell, Burger King, Pizza Hut and AT&T. It’s interesting to track reactions from young consumers, who, surprisingly to this Brit cynic, seem largely to accept their elders getting down with the kids, judging the brands on their merits rather than the lingo used.
O2 did the same thing successfully in the UK, surprising many when it started to talk to its social media consumers in their own language. When @Tunde24_7 tweeted ‘@O2 b*****d big man ting I swear direct me to your owner what happened to my internet connection fam – mans having to use wifi and dat’, O2 replied: “@Tunde24_7 Have you tried to reset the router ting fam, so mans can use the wifi and dat?’ The exchanges went viral, with 90% of comments positive.
While using slang or internet abbreviations on traditional platforms can be fraught with danger for advertisers, it seems that digital slang in narratives and conversations can pay off if used on the right social channels in the right way. But there are other ways to exploit the public’s fascination with exotic language, and here the noble Brit tradition of spoof and parody comes into play again. I was involved with three separate media campaigns last year which used slang and quirky lingo in original ways to engage a range of audiences.
Spitfire Ale, whose ads had previously featured Armstrong and Millers’ slang-speaking RAF pilots, took over the posh Horse and Groom pub in London’s Belgravia and refitted it with graffiti, street slang signage and menus translated into the latest argot: the pilots made personal appearances and broadcasts, and takeaway consisted of a free e-dictionary of street slang, published to coincide with the event. In the same way, Lucozade published a ‘Festival Dictionary’ for the summer season containing youth language, musicians’ slang and technical terminology, packaged either as a wearable camping accessory or online e-book. Authenticity was guaranteed not by me, an ancient babyboomer, but with co-curating by DJs, street stylists and kids. Captain Morgan Rum, meanwhile, used International Talk Like a Pirate Day, which falls in October, to translate a range of the latest tech terms into pirate–speak in a manual (electronic and free to access) resembling a ship’s log.
Street slang, local dialect, yoofspeak or teen-talk, initials and hashtags are what linguists call ‘nonstandard varieties’ of English: by definition not part of the mainstream, they must be deployed with care and skill, if at all. My own research suggest that sweary ads amuse momentarily but don’t leave a lasting positive impression of a brand. My respondents confirm that the odd example of bad grammar (‘Eat Fresh’) will be excused as long as it’s not too flagrant, and pop culture catchphrases (‘Go For The Burn,’ ‘Make It Real’) do confer impact and authenticity, but only when used sparingly. The UK teens I have worked with are more suspicious than their US counterparts, wary of an older generation trying to replicate their private, intimate slang (so shun any use of #YOLO –type abbreviations, Xtreme-type re-spellings). Against this there is evidence that Generation Y and Z members actually view brands online as the equivalent of people they can trust, so it’s the sincerity of the message they value above all else – hence O2’s success. Proliferating blogs, vlogs and print articles highlight the fact that, in a hyper-self-aware market, language itself is a hot topic across all segments right now. There is vast potential for advertisers to move beyond slogans and straplines, to key into the debates about good and bad grammar, fascination with accents, curiosity about dialects and slang, exploiting the digital ecosystem of new platforms and channels as well as traditional media and established push/pull techniques.
This article first appeared in the Beak Street Bugle
And another more recent example of misjudged language…
FESTIVAL DICTIONARY
If you are looking forward to the music festival season, here’s my dictionary, produced for Lucozade…
WHY WE ALL LOVE LEMON MERINGUE
The Fourth Edition of Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. This light piece introduces some of the themes featured in the new edition.
Slang is by definition the most disreputable aspect of our language, but at the same time the most inventive and most colourful, deriving its power from its novelty and revelling in disapproval. Traditionally associated with the enclosed communities of the prison, the army barracks, the factory floor and the older public schools, more recently slang has escaped its boundaries and is running wild.
There are signs everywhere that ordinary people are claiming ownership of language, no longer abiding by the conventions of standard English, but inventing or borrowing their own exotic expressions to add humour, spice and shock-value to conversations. In a society reflecting what academics call ‘superdiversity’, where social classes, ethnicities and regional loyalties are all mixed up, we are all, even traditionally monoglot Brits, in danger of becoming multilingual.
Anyone unfortunate enough to have a teen in the house will know that today’s yoof prefer to communicate in a foreign tongue. Or rather a number of different private languages: there’s the gushing over-dramatising favoured by younger females, whereby slightly inconvenienced translates as ‘totes devz’ (from ‘totally devastated’), moderately interesting is ‘amazeballs’ and really rather good is ‘like, just the nipples.’ Other things the young ones say (and write) are not words at all, just noises: ‘nim-nim-nim’ mocks the boring background sound of adult conversation, ‘meh’ is a verbal shrug of indifference, ‘woop-woop’ a cry of joy.
And then there are the hundreds of abbreviations, used typically for communicating in social media and also creeping, alarmingly, into the classroom. YOLO – ‘you only live once’ was last year’s most irritating slogan, LOL has mutated into LMAO – ‘laughing my ass off’ and TL:DR ‘too long, didn’t read’ into TB: DL, ‘too boring, didn’t listen.’ Abbreviations are spoken, too: when asked to tidy the bedroom, the defiant retort ‘ceebs!’ is a version of ‘CBA’ –‘can’t be arsed.’
The older generation is no longer immune, as postings on social media sites testify. On the Mumsnet website shorthand terms like ‘boyf’, ‘hubz’ and ‘soz’ for sorry are exchanged, while Twitter users in particular vie with one another to coin the most picturesque insults, ‘twatbadger’, ‘arsebiscuit’ and ‘fudgenugget’ being some of the more printable examples. Linguists have only recently uncovered a whole new category of informal speech consisting of the nicknames, in-jokes and witticisms used inside the home. Known as family slang or ‘kitchen-table lingo’ it injects a note of silliness into the domestic routine and names things that otherwise go unnamed. Examples are the dozens of words (‘blabber’, ‘zapper’, ‘melly’, ‘dawicki’) for the TV remote control, ‘trunklements’ meaning grandad’s personal possessions or bits and pieces and ‘Blenkinsop’, the sliding plastic tab on a self-sealing freezer bag.
‘Lemon meringue’ or rhyming slang, whose death has often been announced, is actually still around, though now in the mouths of non-Cockneys, students, journalists and in the home, too where you dry yourself with a ‘Simon (Cowell)’ before putting on your ‘Baracks (Obamas)’.
For linguists the new sound of the street which they call ‘multiethnic urban vernacular’ or MLE (multiethnic London English), and others deride as ‘Jafaican’ or ‘ghetto-speak,’ is an interesting and important phenomenon. Its edgy vocabulary; ‘bare’ (lots), ‘blad’ (friend), ‘choong’ (attractive), ‘merk’ (kill or humiliate), ‘inna’ (nosey or intrusive) may not survive into middle age, but its rhythm and accent show signs of influencing mainstream English.
Of course slang’s traditional users haven’t abandoned it. Criminals still need a secret code (‘stralley’ is a firearm, the police are ‘stabz’) with which to keep the outside world at bay; the police, the army, taxi-drivers, market traders, plumbers, techies, gamers and fashionistas, in fact any group with a special interest, will develop a set of words and phrases with which to baffle outsiders and admit insiders to the group. What has changed is that this kind of language is no longer clandestine, no longer automatically avoided or excluded by the media or shunned by ‘respectable’ people, even if conservatives lament its effect on literacy and traditionalists are, quite understandably, unsettled by it. Irreverent, silly, sometimes disturbing, ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ is, as one linguist called it, ‘the people’s poetry’ (technically it operates just like poetry or literature but is more flexible and creative than either) and at the same time, serves important functions in our day-to-day interactions. It now belongs to everyone and anyone and it’s not going to go away.
SOME EXAMPLES OF RECENT SLANG
Adorkable meaning: clumsy but cute. The blend of ‘adorable’ and ‘dorky’ is currently a term of affection and admiration among teenagers.
BONGO meaning: a lazy, inert colleague. In UK police slang the term uses the initials of ‘books on, never goes out.’
Fatboy Slim meaning: the gym. ‘I’m off down the Fatboy,’ says hubz. ‘Don’t fall on your Mylene (Klass)’ says his better half.
Jinnelz meaning: a swindler or fraud. This exotic-looking word is originally from Caribbean speech where it referred to a ladies-man or conman who was overly ‘congenial.’
Stabby meaning: irritated to the point of violence. A favourite of harassed housewives and mothers, seen increasingly on Mumsnet.
Wasteman meaning: a worthless individual. This all-purpose criticism or insult, based on the notion of ‘a waste of time/space’, is used as a taunt by street-gang members as well as schoolkids.
TONY THORNE
A version of this article appeared on the Sunday Times website in March 2014
tony thorne 