This week we will start with cats hunting cows, and end with expensive face creams.
While perusing the pet aisle of my local supermarket I found myself wondering if my cat preferred tuna or beef-flavoured food.
Thinking on this, however, I decided it was unlikely that our Barney – feisty though he is when hissing at a rival moggy – could bring down a cow. An Aberdeen-Angus weighing roughly 400 times as much as him isn’t quite his natural prey.
Mind you, he’s even less likely to catch a tuna – unless he has deep-sea fishing experience off the Florida Keys that he hasn’t previously mentioned.
Given his druthers, Barney would choose mouse or sparrow-flavoured food. These are his favourite nibbles. But “Still Bleeding Small Rodent”-flavoured cat food probably wouldn’t sell.
This is, of course, because cat food isn’t sold to cats, it is sold to humans. Flavours like salmon, lobster, and duck à l’orange are unnatural things to feed a cat. We fool ourselves. Or, to be more accurate, pet food companies do the fooling for us.
I like to talk about the misuse of English and this is an example of everyday, in-our-shopping-baskets misuse. We consumers are led astray by clever, some might say insidious, or perhaps just downright weird, uses of language.
I recently bought a rug (well, I was present when my wife bought it). Its colour was, the label proclaimed, “happy biscuit”. It was brown. I should have demanded proof of the rug’s (and any accompanying custard creams’) state of cheerfulness but the process had taken too long already and I had shopping-induced foot-weariness. A common ailment.
My shampoo has “extract of bamboo”. Really, what earthly good is bamboo going to do for my greying short back and sides?
That’s tame compared to my wife and daughter’s various bottled hair treatments, which contain flora from the four corners of the earth and minerals dredged from all seven seas – everything from guava juice to argan oil (whatever that is).
They have a vegan shampoo. Do they drink it? Are there, by contrast, meat-based shampoos? You too can pong like a sausage roll!
And you get dog shampoo that smells of spearmint. Why would anyone want a minty dog?
Some cosmetics have price tags that would make Croesus blanch. The justification is in the vaunted descriptions. There are moisturising creams costing hundreds of pounds for a wee tub that contain humectants (eh?), natural tocopherols (what?), or green caviar algae (stop laughing!)
Could it be that the food, cosmetics, carpets, etc., industries employ exotic and unintelligible words to fool the gullible into buying overpriced rubbish? We’re not that stupid. Are we?
Word of the week
Foma (noun)
A collection of harmless untruths. EG: “The claims of fancy face creams are a foma demonstrating the triumph of hope over experience.”
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
