[Ads-l] "And tell 'em * sent you!"

[George Thompson]

Instructing someone to tell the bouncer at a speakeasy "Joe sent me" is a
different proposition from Wilson's "Tell 'em Spider sent you."  The
bouncer is being assured that the guy at the door is not an undercover
Prohibition agent, while Spider wants his sponsor to know that he's gotten
a customer who heard of his joint through an ad on Spider's show.

I listen regularly to a low-watt radio station here -- WHVW, I've
recommended it here before.  The station is always toe-dancing at the edge
of insolvency, and has few advertisers.  One was a local restaurant.  I
went in there to eat one day, and thought I would give the station a boost,
so I told the boss, I heard of your place from the ad on WHVW.  He was
baffled.  I explained.  He was still baffled.  And I never heard the
restaurant advertised there again.  I surmise that at some time he got
talked into a month's worth of ads; his book-keeper misunderstood, and had
been sending checks to the station every month.  Once the boss got
unbaffled, he stopped the checks, and so my good deed cost the station one
of its sponsors.

GAT


On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 1:25 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 1947 is great, Wilson, not least because it sort of bears out my own
> > perception.
> >
>
> Not to mention that "... Spider ..." can't be any earlier than '46, since
> he wasn't on the air, During The War.
>
>
> Way off topic:
> Is anybody else getting comments rejected because they contain "unknown
> commands"? Even quoting these "commands" - one of them a one-word
> book-title in French - in a message asking about the problem caused UGA to
> reject that message because it contained "unknown commands."
>
> One comment had to do with someone being "brothers with" - like "friends
> with" - someone's grandmother and the other was about the phrase, "got it
> snaked" = "got it made."
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998..

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