B. CRAIG GRAFTON - DID YOU EVER WONDER?

Author is a retired attorney having practiced for 35 years in Illinois who now lives in Texas and started writing stories about a year and a half ago.

Did You Ever Wonder?

​     Did you ever wonder why all those tv commercials are reduced to slogans of just three to five words? Think about it. You see them all the time on tv, McDonald’s ‘I’m lovin it,’  Arby's ‘We have the meats,’ and the classic that started it all Wendy’s memorable ‘Where’s the beef?’’ Fast food, fast commercials.
     But it’s not just fast food companies that use them. Car manufacturers especially rely on them, ‘Let’s go places,’ and ‘Zoom, Zoom, Zoom,’ You can’t get any simpler than zoom, zoom, zoom, one word three times. Genius. But what is really genius today is that car commercials mix politics into their slogans like  ‘Empower the Drive.’  If we can empower women, then by God we can empower drivers too. And don’t forget “Driving Matters.’ Duh where’d the heck that one come from? Out of left field? Finally did you ever notice that car slogans always attach themselves to the upcoming holiday season. So at Christmas time we get, ‘A December to Remember,’ a rhyming slogan. That’s good.  Rhymes are good. For as we all know, “rhymes bind the mind from the ridiculous to the sublime.” *
    Which brings us up to an HNL, a Hole Nother Level, those rhyming catchy jingles like ‘Nationwide is on your side.’ A masterpiece of commercial musical composition if there ever was one. Five words, a rhyme, and a catchy tune all rolled into one nonstop song that plays over and over again on the broken record player of your mind so that you can’t stop singing or humming that stupid song all day long.
    Now sometimes slogans exceed the five word limit like, ‘Better ingredients, better pizza, Papa John’s.’’ Six words but three phrases. Still not a good idea. Pushing the envelope. Gets one to thinking. Better ingredients? Better ingredients than what? Last week’s, last year’s, or the other guy’s? And who in the hell is the other guy and what ingredients did he use?  Too many words kills a commercial. 
    That’s why politicians also use three word campaign slogans.They don’t want the voters to stop and think. Heaven forbid! Think of Obama’s slogans. Remember this man is a Harvard graduate and a lawyer. ‘Yes We Can,’ and ‘Hope and Change.’ The voters swallowed those sugar coated concoctions hook, line, and sinker. No wonder he’s the smartest man in America.
    Well the list of slogans could go on and on and by now I’m sure you the reader are stopping to see how many you can come up with. But you can bet your sweet bippy, that is if you still have one. Don’t know what a bippy is? Well look it up. That’s what the internet is for. Just remember that it’s another four word phrase. Anyway you can bet your sweet bippy that nothing will change. That’s the way it always has been and the way it always will be ‘world without end amen.’ So really there’s no reason at all to wonder about why three to five word slogans are used. It’s simple. Simple like a commercial. The answer has always been with us. That great wit of a man H. L. Mencken gave it to us many years ago when he so brilliantly proclaimed, “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” And if that’s too long of a sentence for you to comprehend or understand just remember these four little words, that’s right four, four words, ‘keep it simple stupid.’ KISS if you can’t  remember that. And above all else let us never forget, ‘All Slogans Matter.’
 
*This is not a quote from a great writer, poet, or philosopher. I made it up and because it sounds so profound I thought it deserved its own footnote.