Slang: The Authoritative Topic By Topic Dictionary Of American Lingoes From All Walks O - Hardcover

Let's Try a Few and See If They Repeat 'Em

Advertising, for its part, has so prostrated itself on the altar of word worship that it has succeeded in creating a whole language of its own. And while Americans are bilingual in this respect, none can confuse the language of advertising with their own.

-- William H. Whyte Jr. and the editors of Fortune, in Is Anybody Listening? (Simon & Schuster, 1952)

Ads for computers, cars, vacations, phone service, and liquor are popping up faster than you can say World Wide Web. All the big Web sites have them -- Netscape, Yahoo, Pathfinder, HotWired, CNet, ZDNet, ESPN SportsZone, Playboy -- and so do many of the smaller ones.

-- Michelle V. Rafter on Internet advertising, the Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1995

In the late 1950s the nation went gaga over the slangy metaphoric hyperbole of Mad Ave. The phrases were dubbed "gray flannelisms" (from the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) by syndicated columnist Walter Winchell, while fellow columnist Dorothy Kilgallen called them "ad agencyisms." They were all convoluted, and most were based on whether or not something -- an ad, a campaign, a slogan, etc. -- would work. The most famous flannelism was "Let's send it up the flagpole and see if they salute it," but columnists and TV personalities repeated hundreds more with relish. A few of many:

• Let's pull up the periscope and see where we're at.
• I see feathers on it but it's still not flying.
• Let's toss it around and see if it makes salad.
• Let's guinea-pig that one.
• Let's roll some rocks and see what crawls out.
• Well, the oars are in the water and we're headed upstream.
• Let's drop this down the well and see what kind of splash it makes.

Were these real or were they created to get a line in a newspaper column? It would seem that they were more real than hype. No less an observer than John Crosby of the old New York Herald Tribune deemed them "the curiously inventive (and, in some cases, remarkably expressive) language of the advertising industry." This is not to say a few were not created for outside consumption. In late 1957, when the Soviet Union put a dog in earth orbit, the metaphoric handstand that attracted attention was "Let's shoot a satellite into the client's orbit and see if he barks."

That fad has passed (at least the public side of it has) and things are a little less colorful in advertising and public relations, but plenty remains, and something new is on the horizon, the vast potential for advertising on the Internet, for which there is already a nascent slang with such terms as banner, button, click-through, hit, impression pixels, and traffic tracking being applied to cyberadvertising.

Copyright © 1990, 1998 by Paul Dickson