[Corpora-List] Corpus linguistics in everyday life

[Lee, David]

Re: ""The personal loan with the personal price"

Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't see any problem with this as an advertisement. It seems clear that the copywriters were well aware of the negative connotations of "personal price" and were deliberately playing on it, the way almost all ads play on words, seeking to titillate, shock, amuse, etc. in order to get us jaded modern-day consumers to pay attention to the ad. The bank wants to emphasise the individual nature of their loan interest (a personally priced rate, not a blanket/group rate) and are hoping that the "double-take" readers have will make this message sink in. Typical advertising language, and, I think, brilliant ad copywriters... my hat off to them. (Also, note that usages of "personal price" are normally almost always preceded by "pay" (not present in this ad), which contributes a lot to the negative meaning.)


D.

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David YW Lee
dvdlee at umich.edu
Research Fellow, MICASE project
English Language Institute, University of Michigan
TCF Building, 401 E. Liberty, Suite 350, Rm 3140
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104-2298, USA. Tel: +1 734-615-9638 (O)

MICASE web site: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htm
Corpus-based Linguistics web site: http://devoted.to/corpora
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