Blog Post – Week 13
In the reading of Chinua Achebe, we were given some enlightenment and insight as to the importance of language. In humanities myths, folklore, and religion, words and language are often given magical properties and are even given credit to such extents as being the tool that created life and all existence. Language is often perceived as being inherent, instead of only the capacity of language. And we too often take for granted the power that words have; from being in part responsible for our progress throughout ages in civilization and humanity to having the power to possess a man.
Achebe also notes, that “like any other human invention, (language) can be abused, can be turned from its original purpose into something useless or even deadly.” Language, like all things that even come to touch the thoughts of man, eventually becomes distorted and perverted. Only too often a day than we take notice of, marketing perverts language and takes assault to exhort your mind.
Being up at hours of the night the rest of the world has established for that all so useless and inefficient task of “sleeping.” I commonly resort to late night infomercials as my source of entertainment, in these advertisements I find a parade that seems to flaunt pride and homage to the distortion of language that Achebe notes.
Take for example this little laughable (yet depressing, since you know people bought it) example of linguistic perversion. The MagniScribe!
Given the importance of language, who ever led the marketing of this junk must truly be unwanted by the unwanted scum of the earth. These people would lie somewhere below a lobbyist who lobbies against lower bus fares for widows of war veterans, who happen to be on their way to donate, volunteer, and adopt poor orphaned children with deformities that were caused from nuclear fallout at an orphanage made of completely recycled products and adopted injured animals.
These people use words like “Magically Magnetic,” and “Patented Magnetic Engineering Physics” to give this poor product some sort of extra-ordinary value and the faux-“cutting edge sciencey yet magical high tech innovation” feel. Really they’re just trying to give hype and disguise to something that is really just an ordinary ball point pen (not some new revolutionary pen technology like the commercial would have you believe), that is attached to a magnet that is attached to a clock on a string in some type of Flava Flav fashion, that will magically make you some sort of organized, efficient, on schedule, on time, and always ready to…. write something down. Whilst somehow justifying the fact that they’re charging thirty bucks for a pen, I mean “MagiScribe!”
