
“Just let some joy smoke sift into your system” - samclemens
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359
======
smacktoward
The fascinating thing about old advertisements to me is how much faith they
placed in the power of words to sell products. Old ads are absolutely
_swimming_ in copy. Words upon words upon words; literal walls of text. And
the farther back in time you go, the more words they piled on.

This is in contrast to modern advertising, where it's understood that _images_
are what sell products and the ad strives to communicate visually, through
photography, illustrations or a striking logo. We're a long way from the
heyday of cigarette advertising, but I bet a lot more people today can still
tell you about the Marlboro Man than could tell you what Marlboro's slogan was
back then. (The answer: "Come to where the flavor is.")

My modern mind looks at those old ads and reacts viscerally in the negative,
recoiling at the thought of all that _reading._ I wonder how much of that is
something fundamental, something basic about the way the brain works that ad
men in the old days didn't understand, and how much is something new --
something that makes modern people different from how people were back then.
How much contemporary culture has trained us to discount the word and favor
the image, and what that says about us and the world we have built.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Definitely new. It's something I've watched in my lifetime - ad copy getting
shorter and shorter, and the reading age dropping further and further.

I think the copy in this ad is super-effective. It honestly made me feel like
rushing out and buying some of the product - even though I've never smoked,
and never will.

My normal reaction to ads is somewhere between outraged irritation and utter
indifference, so that's quite a result.

I think we lost that literary slant some time in the 1980s. I used to value
the language in pre-70s science fiction, precisely because it was written like
this. Alfred Bester and RA Lafferty did beautiful things with English, and I
think Bester was a former ad man - so that explains that.

After Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Alien, science fiction became a lot more
visual - even written science fiction, which suddenly became more about images
(often stock images) than the power of words.

~~~
eropple
I wonder how much of it is the primacy of an American audience over a more
British one, at least for English media; while American advertisements in the
fifties and sixties weren't these wordless demands that you worship their
#brand, they were generally shorter and more terse--which coincides with a
very big boost in American consumer power and more of a push to appeal to the
American audience. I believe it was Stephen King who noted that a British
advertising man with a proper education could make copy for ribbed condoms
read like the Magna goddamn Carta (his words, not mine).

Personally, I just like _reading_. (Which is probably also why I like
writing.) So stuff like this is interesting from the perspective of just how
to put things together to come up with neat strings of metaphors and
interesting thoughts. So getting to watch people who are really, really good
at their craft come out to play is rad.

------
underpantsgnome
Reminds me of Dr. Bronner's soap, the way the rambling, hyphenated copy freely
invents words and associates the product with feelings of peace and goodwill.

~~~
eponeponepon
Puts me a little in mind of the little ad segments of _Ubik_.

~~~
noonespecial
I was having the hardest time figuring out why Philip K. Dick sprang instantly
to mind reading this. Thanks. Could not for the life of me remember where or
why!

------
__david__
So tobacco is what the "Do you have Prince Albert in a can" prank phone call
is referencing? I've heard that forever and never knew why it was funny… I
knew it was a double meaning, but the only Prince Albert I knew about was, um…
something else (that wouldn't go in a can).

~~~
smacktoward
Yep:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_(tobacco)#/media...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_\(tobacco\)#/media/File:Prince_Albert_Cigarettes.JPG)

~~~
mcguire
Also, Prince Albert and Middleton's Carter Hall are pretty decent, among the
OTC/drug store/old codger blends. (Sir Walter Raleigh's texture reminds me of
grape nuts, though.)

~~~
mordechai9000
I found a gravel bar in Alaska where the river had deposited several battered,
barely recognizable old Prince Albert cans. There was some other stuff, too,
but nothing I could identify. A local told me that middens from miners in the
20s and 30s were eroding out of the riverbank upstream. Apparently they
weren't considered to have any archaeological value, but it was interesting to
poke around the old trash, anyway.

------
gumernatorial
I wonder how this style of advertising would work in a modern SaaS product.

It would be a rebellion against virtually every principle of modern ad copy
while still being rooted in something that sold units. Might try it.

~~~
eponeponepon
Ask the question the other way round: will modern ad copy seem as different as
this to readers in a hundred years time?

~~~
gumernatorial
It undoubtedly will, if words are even a meaningful concept at all.

------
eponeponepon
Whoever wrote those was a stone cold genius. They are making me want a
cigarette from across nearly a century. Ridiculous.

I mean, I am a smoker, I was probably going to go for one soon enough anyway,
I'm sure it's just coincidence, buuuuuut... damn.

~~~
NTripleOne
Nah mate I know what you're on about - I genuinely want to try some of this
stuff now.

------
bitwize
This is a riot. It's almost like a Homestar Runner parody of "old-timey"
speech. I'm particularly fond of the recurring verbal brohug, "just between
(or among) ourselves". Like you're being let in on a little secret from one of
your chums from the bar.

------
eponeponepon
For anyone in the habit of skipping/blocking/ignoring comments on articles,
this one is worth a look:
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359#comment-152621...](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359#comment-1526212)

------
kujenga
The prose in these ads feels like I'm reading a Trump interview.

------
nickpeterson
I wish hacker news allowed a short description of why something might be
interesting... How about I take an hour and try to interpret this history of a
Prince Albert advertising campaign?

~~~
maxander
It could be any number of things- insight into the history of smoking ads, the
bygone culture of advertisement copy as poetry, or the bit about the "poetry
of industrialism."

But if you can read the words "BUT just among ourselves, you better start a
rapid whiz system to keep tabs as to how fast you’ll buzz from low smoke
spirits to TIP-TOP-HIGH" and not understand why someone thought it worth
sharing, I don't know what to say.

~~~
nickpeterson
Fine, but a sentence would suffice, something akin to, 'Interesting older
copy.' because this site is generally tech oriented, I often click a link and
start reading assuming it will wrap around but after a few minutes it doesn't
and I question the purpose of the link on hacker news...

~~~
DanBC
> because this site is generally tech oriented

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." has
been in the guidelines for years.

~~~
nickpeterson
Look, let it go, I've already exposed you as a Prince Albert shill.

