[Ads-l] Be the you...

[Jonathan Lighter]

Mmmmmmmm. Frozen pound cake.  Defrosted even better.

The "everybody doesn't like something" part actually slipped my mind.

Scary.

JL

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 4:21 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>> On Jun 17, 2016, at 2:22 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>>
>> "Be the you who talks to your dermatologist about Stelara!"
>>
>> So urges my TV.  This structure reminds me of the equally odd, equally
>> transparent, "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee!"
>
> Actually for me the more interesting part of that slogan is the preamble, "Everybody doesn't like something (but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee)", which does have a weird mapping between logical structure and surface form--'for every person x, there is some thing y such that it's not the case that x likes y'.  So non-straightforward that it makes you hungry for frozen pound cake.
>>
>> I think it was explained here that the Sara Lee slogan sounded quite
>> weird in the mid '60s, even if today's whippersnappers say "Meh."
>>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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

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