When I first took this screen-shot, the object of my ire was clearly visible, but apparently it flicked away just as I grabbed it. You've probably happened upon a bus or two with this poster pasted on its side, with the tagline "She always thought she was somebody...and she was."
Ms. Claire very alertly pointed this out to me the other day, and I have puzzled and puzzled ('til my puzzler was sore) over it since.
She always thought she was somebody...and she was. What in the name of William J. Strunk does that mean, exactly? And how did They (I'm not entirely sure who is responsible for this... Paramount? The Devil? The same people who decided that Two Weeks Notice didn't need an apostrophe, for reasons that escape me?) arrive at that?
I imagine a crack team of monkeys at typewriters were involved. And then, when they produced something serviceable (which is to say, pretty much anything other than what eventually got put on all those buses), They fired the monkeys and got a bunch of marketing people to do it. Then there was a meeting in which the marketers decided "hey, let's put a bunch of those 'words' in a row, throw in an ellipsis, and slap it on the poster! We'll be rich!" And so, this blight upon our lives was born.
I get angry about these sorts of things all the time. I could never have a career in marketing because I know what words mean and I put them into sentences that make sense. I can't even rewrite that tagline, because I don't really know what they're trying to tell us about Ms. Queen Latifah's new movie. "It was just as she suspected, she was somebody." "She always knew she was special... turns out, she was correct."
Personally, I think they're barking up a tree that will not yield a line that makes sense. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to say all that much about the movie itself. So how, how, how on earth did that get green-lighted? Didn't someone along the way say "Wait, I'm remembering something... something about the English language...and vigorous prose... it's hazy, but it's telling me that if we put this on the side of a bus, everyone's going to think we're a bunch of idiots. No, wait, it's gone now. Let's do it!"
The answer is no. No one who cares about their alleged mother tongue lodged any objections. No one saved those marketers from themselves. And we are left to pay the price during those long, dark, winter nights. Tossing, turning, asking for a sign from God. "She always thought she was somebody...and she was." What does it mean?
Also, Gerard Depardieu is in the movie. How sad is that? Why, Cyrano? Why?
9 comments:
i believe the tag line from "save the last Dance" was
The Only Person You Need To Be Is Yourself.
i hate everything.
God that's awful.
They should put me in charge of this. Not writing taglines, but making sure the idiotic ones don't get through.
The scary thing is, the rejected list of lines was probably even more terrifying.
It's like those ads for that weight loss drugs Anna Nicole Smith hocks which says something like: " get the attention you deserve...Anna is."
So she's getting the attention I deserve? What the fuck. It's my attention. I'm no grammar wizard, but this drives me nuts.
I'm guessing most people are at work right now, like me. But please, watch this.
i know it's not a tagline (because sheena has stolen my tagline ire) but it really ticks me off when people use adverbs instead of adjectives.
like, "i feel badly about missing the movie." no. you don't feel badly. your powers of feeling are excellent. i know because you are feeling something. you're feeling bad. you need to modify the noun that is your feeling. not the verb of the activeness of feeling the bad.
wow. that might be the best sentence i've ever written... sheena?
The best sentence ever written in the history of the English language... probably better than anything written in Anglo-Saxon, too.
And I didn't really steal... I gave you credit, no?
while i agree that the copy in question makes for a piss poor tagline, i'm not particularly confused about what it means. "She always thought she was somebody... and she was." The first clause implies that while she thought she was special, no one else seemed to realize it, as it was only she who thought herself to be special and not, implied by the lack of any other subjects in the clause, anyone else. The second clause affirms that she was truly a somebody, implying that other people were aware of her importance or specialness. Meaning that other people thought she was a somebody (someone special or important) too, even though she may have been unaware of this fact. It's pretty vague, but, like I said, it makes sense to me.
I would also like to point to a more well received tagline that is more nonsensical than this one: Budweiser's "True." Yet, no one complained.
Budweiser's a beer and a movie's a movie. You can't drink a movie-yet.
you can try to explain it away all you want, will. it still makes no sense.
it's not vague, it's just crap.
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