I’m about to coin a word.
I don’t know if the thing I’m going to coin about is happening in the US right now (or elsewhere), but it sure happens a lot on this side of the water, and it is driving me nuts.
It happens in commercials on both radio and TV. They’ll show you, or tell you about, some consumer item. Let’s say it’s a sofa.* And (on TV) they’ll show you the price. (Let’s say it’s $499.) And then they’ll say it out loud. They’ll say: “Now — only four nine nine!”
Not “four hundred ninety-nine”. These commercials seem to be utterly terrified of saying the word “hundred” out loud.
So there’s the word I’m coining. Ekatonosmilophobia. The irrational fear of saying the word “hundred”.
Why won’t they just say it?! Do people at all the ad agencies responsible for those commercials really think that if you want that sofa, the pronunciation of the word “hundred” is genuinely going to stop you from buying it? Or do they think we’re so stupid that we can’t read the numbers and see that there are at least three of them, and know perfectly well that this means the word “hundred” is going to be lurking in there someplace? Because the people in the store sure aren’t going to be afraid to say that word at the cash register, and charge an amount containing the H word to our credit / debit cards or take the h**dred Euro/pound bills/notes out of our hot little hands.
(It just happened again, in a Dell computers commercial. “Five seven nine.” Oh, come ON, Dell!! Aaaaaargh!)
Seriously! JUST SAY HUNDRED, commercial people! (And don’t even get me started on the four-digit numbers.)
(sigh) Okay, that’s my rant for this year. Back to work.
*And another thing. What is it with the approximately eight million sofa ads on TV the day after Christmas? Do people really trash that many sofas over the holidays?
[tags]commercial, Christmas, price, sofa, television, radio, ekatonosmilophobia[/tags]
5 comments
It’s all the parties. They’re hard on sofas.
What I’m finding odd is the ‘3 separate numbers’ reading – in the states I’d expect ‘Five Seventy Nine’. Here, at least, it’s just more colloquial to elide the ‘hundred’ and adds 3 syllables to the price phrase, which can sound stuffy or pretentious… thousands even more so.
It’s the obesity thing, we are becoming too weighty for our sofas to cope (along with the cat scratching activity)!
A question, if the advert does not specify “hundred” could you argue that it was “point”?
You’ve obviously never written TVCs… at least the cheap & nasty kind. 🙂 This is all about saving “unnecessary” syllables to give you more room for other words elsewhere in the ad.
In the typical low-budget retail TVC, the client usually gives you about 90sec of straight “facts” they absolutely want in the ad VO before you even start sticking in some sentence structure.
I regretfully admit that I’m guilty of ekatonosmilophobia on at least one TVC script. Oooh, it was even a furniture store. 🙂
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