Sunday, January 18, 2009

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a superlative!

I was in the bathroom and happened to glance down at a box of the wife's feminine products and noticed that it boasted "Super Plus Absorbency!"

I turned to her and asked, "What does Super Plus Absorbency mean?"

"It's more than Super Absorbency," she replies, not even skipping a beat. She then went on the explain that because they had already used Super, they needed to add another descriptive word to show that it was more absorbent than even their Super Absorbency feminine products.

I realize that advertisers use this tactic often, adding on extra words until you get things like XXXL size t-shirts, or Super Mega Cleaning Power! However, there is very little unity between advertisers and how their combination of words like "Advanced" and "Super", and so to avoid confusion, there should be an industry standard on how to use these adjectives. We need to have some kind of scale of reference akin to XKCD's handy guide to converting to metric. It could look something like this:

Scale of Reference to Advertising Adjectives (from least to awesomest)

Normal
Plus
Super
Super Plus
Ultra
Mega
Ultra Plus
Mega Plus
Super Ultra
Advanced
Ultra Plus
Extra Plus
Super Extra
Super Extra Plus
Super Mega Ultra
Mega Ultra Plus
Ultimate
Super Ultimate
Super Advanced
Super Mega Ultra Plus
Ultimate Plus
i-(insert noun, such as iPad)

1 comment:

Teeps said...

We only need a few words, we can do the whole job of describing everything with just a few words. Good, Plus Good, and Double Plus Good. That's all we need!