plus and minus

[Nancy Friedman]

"Plus" (v.) has been cropping up in commercial language for a couple of years. Enterprise Rent-A-Car ran an ad campaign with the slogan "Plus Your Life" (translation: Improve your life). Here in the Bay Area, Sutter Health's ads say "We Plus You" (translation: We make life better for you).

I wrote a column for the Visual Thesaurus that traced this usage back to Walt Disney in the 1940s:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/candlepwr/shall-we-plus/

"To plus our plan" doesn't quite translate to "increase." It's broader and more general--"to add features, to make it work better." 
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Nancy Friedman
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Lighter [mailto:wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM] 
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2014 5:41 AM
Subject: plus and minus

If you like your numbers going north instead of south, you'll like this.

TV commercial:

Guy: "So what we're looking for is a way to plus our accounting firm*'*s mobile plan."

Gal: "And minus our expenses!"

Used to be "increase" and "decrease."

JL



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org