Sunday, May 07, 2006
Diagramming a Wendy’s cup
This (rather wordy) inscription on current Frosty’s (Frosties?) cups at Wendy’s got me thinking about a couple things:
Do something nice for yourself. Something rich, smooth, and chocolaty. And while you’re at it bring someone you like, or admire from afar a Frosty, because everyone likes doing what tastes right.
(If you haven’t noticed (here and here, for instance), billboard and other commercial prose is my favorite thing to analyze grammatically.)
First, the lack of a comma after “afar” really threw me at first, causing me to render “Frosty” the subject of “admire” with an adverbial phrase inserted, before I realized that the phrase ended at “afar” and “Frosty” belonged to “bring.” Although I admit that the lack of a comma doesn’t really lead to an alternate meaning, since there’s no sensible other way for a native speaker of English to read that sentence.
Second, when I posed this to my mother-in-law (also imbibing a Frosty at the time), what she questioned was how you could do what tastes right. That question is more semantic than grammatical—you could “do what feels right” (on which the Frosty cup is clearly playing) or “eat what tastes right,” but the conflation of these two phrases is either a catchy slogan or a semantic mess (or both, I guess).