“Just let some joy smoke sift into your system” | Hacker News Reader

“Just let some joy smoke sift into your system”

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

85 pointssamclemens42 comments

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.

They cover this transition in the documentary "The Century of the Self". I highly recommend it.

fascinating observation. I never noticed this until now...

It seems like back then people were less saturated with media and seemed to trust and accept what they were told a lot more than today. Just consider old public service announcements - we would balk at being told what to do and how to live our lives. So maybe those long advertisements worked - even if you didn't read all of it, the text was there, surely containing all kinds of proof and reason.

Right now we are experiencing another massive loss of trust in the media in general, and we seem to trust advertised products only if they're presented by the people we already explicitly follow on social media - maybe future generations will wonder how a single image, unattached to our 'relationships' could ever have worked?

Sounds like you'd enjoy the field of "media studies".

I have a bachelor's degree in communications, so I guess you could say that :-D

People change. And therefore, I suppose, so does the message.

In 1919, I guess, a person didn't have much to read from. They could probably read a newspaper from back to back while having breakfast. They didn't have a radio or television. They didn't have smartphones. They didn't have a lot of books at home either, I presume.

So it would make sense for advertisers to fill their precious page with words, because someone's going to read that.

On the other hand we're practically swimming in words these days. At any point I could touch a button or screen and receive more text than I could possibly read in an hour. Learning when to stop reading is very much an essential part of today's life. ("Ain't nobody got time for that", which is actually a surprisingly insightful statement.)

Just my two cents.

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.

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.

Good thoughts, and I think it's "both", but don't make the mistake of assuming every era gets to choose freely whatever medium it wants to use. This might be at least partly a story of technologies. For example it's possible that in the 1920s they would've loved to use more images, if cameras were easier to get, and easier to use, and photographs were easier to print. (And anyplace I use "easier," feel free to substitute "cheaper.")

Yep, this is almost certainly part of it; but I'm not sure technological determinism tells the entire story. Consider that in the latter half of the 19th century, for instance, the American magazine market was driven by titles that used new technologies like daguerrotypy and then photography to present big, striking images -- titles like the National Police Gazette (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Police_Gazette), Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Leslie's_Illustrated_New...), and Godey's Lady's Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godey%27s_Lady%27s_Book).

The advertising and poster art of the same period, though, is much more text-oriented. Look at Wikimedia's collections of ads from the 1870s (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:1870_advertiseme...) and 1880s (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:1880s_advertisem...) and you'll see what I mean -- though if you go through them chronologically you can also see them getting simpler and more streamlined as time goes on, so it was definitely a field in transition.

I wonder how much of the lag is just because of the way advertising as a business works. No ad, after all, gets run unless it first gets approved by a client; and the clients are usually more conservative and risk-averse than their ad-makers are. So advertising's slowness in following the culture could just come down to the fact that a campaign has to appeal to the sensibilities of stodgy old business dudes if the public is ever going to see it at all.

It's always seemed a little ironic to me that literacy rates have been on the rise at the same time that human communication in general appears to be moving away from the written form (UIs with indecipherable pictograms instead of text, ads, the whole "tl;dr" culture, etc.)

I think a lot of these are phrases that had emotional impact at the time. For example, these phrases:

   >Just between ourselves....
   >Well, sir, you'll be so all-fired happy
   >Say, you'll have a streak of []luck
   >Right now while the going's good

These would be like the equivalent in our time of phrases like,

    >You won't believe what happens next...
    >These ten things will.....
    >This one trick discovered by a mom.....

Some of those phrases really make you want to click, until they get overused and the public gets inured to them. Then they will be replaced by other phrases in the future. That is not the only skill the writer of this copy had, of course, but it's one of them.

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.

Puts me a little in mind of the little ad segments of Ubik.

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!

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).

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_(tobacco)#/media...

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.)

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.

I suppose technically, the PA we're thinking about could go in a can.

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.

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

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

"Fire up your lappy-top computer-device and watch your World-Wide-Web-app' whiz along at tip-top-speed with Node.js! Yes, sir, when you hear the name of Node.js you are bound to think, 'that's just the spot for the app' I intend-to-build!' From one gentleman to another, your eyes will pop-out-o-head when you see how lightning-quick and easy-like-Sunday-morning it is to build smashing, dashing, never-clashing app's with the power of Node.js -- from Joyent, truly the first name in Web-development-joy! Why, chap, it's right in the name! Just between ourselves, when you start your text-editor-program and write your app' with the two-fisted-power of Node.js, you can rest easy that it will not grow bigger-than-a-breadbox, nor collapse in a hot mess-o-dependencies, thanks to our patented Micro-Service Architecture! Don't tarry, good sir! Hurry to the Inter-Net and down-load our precious Node.js to-day!"

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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?

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.

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...

Then, how about these descriptions:

"long article on long winded text forms misses the point" or "... tries to prove a point"

"ad copy by example's the charm"

"author missing pulse of time reminisces on golden age"

disclaimer: too long; didn't read

> 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.

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

To me, it's interesting to see that grammar-hacking wordplay Of this sort (a la doge meme) hiis not an entirely new phenomenon.

And they're just fun to read.

This comment is pretty funny juxtaposed with the one above regarding heavy copy in advertising.

Alternatively, you could practice reading for effect and be better at doing it yourself.

tl;dr culture is not a positive. Slow down.

>a positive

So then, culture is not? Just isn't? Doesn't make sense.

(tl;dr culture) is not a positive. Not "tl;dr: culture is not a positive".

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