I've been collecting photos all semester, but haven't taken the time to blog them. So now, here they all are. I noticed the word play in most of the advertisements, and the advertiser's use of words with certain connotations, and thought about the reasons for them to do this. Most of them are quite interesting!
This was a Carl's Junior advert obviously, but at first I only noticed the image of the carl burger. On closer look, I realized that the carl's burger has actually crushed a person, save for his feet, and that this person has feet that looks suspiciously like that of dear Ronald MacDonald. So then I realized that this advert was not merely advertising for Carl's junior's burgers. but also putting MacD's down at the same time. The words above the advert then came into focus, and everything fell into place. The advert was outrightly putting MacD's down! Since we are primed to think of Ronald Macdonald whenever a clown is spoken about in relation to fast food! The advert hence plays on 'clown', banking on the audience knowing what they refer to, and putting a pun on the word, both to mean Ronald, and to mean the verb phrase clowning around, as in 'fooling around'.
This is another example of wordplay, but for a different reason. Instead of using 'Too hot to handle', 'Two' replaces 'too'. The reason for doing this here, however, is not such an interesting one, and I'm guessing Mac's only used it to appear more interesting, and also to advertise McSpicy's double pattie. This is a common technique used by advertisers, mostly just to try to make the audience take a second look, but perhaps it has been overused? and the audience probably don't take that much notice anymore.
This notice caught my eye, and I wondered whether there was really such a word as 'reroofing'. So I went to search the meaning online, but it turns out that this word doesn't actually exist! or at least not till very recently. However, the morpheme 're' has a meaning we all know, which is that of 'doing over'. Based on this, we can guess that reroofing would mean replacing the roof tiles or something like that? the lexical priming of morpheme meanings makes guessing the meanings of new words we did not previously know, much easier, and it's how we understand passages or speeches even if we do not know every single word within that text.
This chinese advertisement also plays on the word 蒸 (steam) when they actually mean 真 (really). There is hence a dual meaning to the sentence, meaning that the spa provides a way of slimming through the use of steaming techniques, for those who REALLY want to slim down, and that steaming is REALLY 'shiok' for lack of a better word to describe '过瘾', and that steaming is REALLY not painful at all.
Just a quirky thought with regard to this advertisement: I always thought menus was used only for food. But upon seeing this, I realized that maybe not, since the computer too, has a start menu. I'm still not used to using 'menu' for anything other than food though. =) Also, notice the 9th item on the menu, it says 'dinner make-up'. I suppose this menu is meant for the older generation, since it was found in a local neighbourhood, and that's why, to fit their lexical priming, 'dinner make-up' was used instead of what we would probably use, 'makeover'.
