THE LANGUAGE OF MARKETING:Between a Rock and a Hard Rule
12/08/2009

Communication has forever been at the heart of marketing. Sellers must communicate with buyers. More recently, technology has enabled marketers the luxury of two-way communication so that buyers, too, can feasibly communicate with sellers. At the center of effective marketing communications is a common language. The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing is pleased to submit this piece, “The Language of Marketing: Between a Rock and a Hard Rule” as the first part of a continuing series about using the English language in the financial community. JFAM’s editorial director, Kip Fry, lends his own perspective on this subject below.

Bill Wreaks, Chief Analyst,The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing

I once spoke to an older woman who couldn’t stand reading the local newspaper because reporters there always started sentences with the word “and.” Yes, it’s true it sometimes happens. But no, I couldn’t believe it was all that sinful. I just could not persuade her of that. She remained quite emphatic that the grammatical error was terrible and that it was a horrible paper.

Scholars note that there is no precise rule forbidding starting sentences that way. (The same is true with the word “but.” ) In fact, the principle concerning “and” has been largely ignored since the times of the Anglo-Saxons. Even William Shakespeare used it to begin some of his sentences.

When it comes to rules that guide the English language, it is sometimes hard to know what is a rule and what is not. Not everyone knows that there is actually no such convention against splitting infinitives. But “Fowler’s Modern English Usage,” one of the most trusted sources for writers, discusses “the irrational nervousness that many people feel when they imagine that by splitting an infinitive, they are in danger of breaking a terrible taboo.”

Probably the easiest way to look at these principles is to realize that they are really just a guide. Be careful, though. Don’t take too many liberties with them. There is no way everyone around the world can follow the same English grammar and usage rules all of the time (especially if they speak French).

But these things do make a huge difference when it comes to editors. They are the ones who have to make sure that things are consistent throughout a publication. They cannot allow one style to be used at the beginning of a piece and another style at the end. It should be the same throughout. Otherwise it will look like editors don’t know what they are doing.

Linguist James C. Bostain once wrote: “Almost anyone who has survived the educational system in this or most other countries is certain to be confused about one language – his own.” English is confusing enough and it is hard to correct everything all the time. It is one in which an identical spelling of three different words can appear in the same sentence, have three different meanings and still be correct, “since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present,” and in which the word “quick” does not rhyme with “Buick,” even though four out of five of its letters are the same.

Go figure, but those are some of the crazy rules applied to the language. Call them hard rules. Without them, we would only talk gibberish and never say what it was we wanted to communicate. So rules must exist. They are what tell us that the “u” in “quick” cannot be pronounced the same way as the “u” in “Buick” because the first one follows a “q.” As a result, the “u” is given the sound of “w,” so “quick” remains a one-syllable word (“kwick”), as opposed to “byoo-ick.”

When it comes to the English language and all its vagaries, though, some rules have to be given latitude. When they govern these situations, they tend to be much softer, and accordingly could be called soft rules, at least by me. Take, for example, the cases mentioned at the beginning.

Bostain continues: “Textbooks will tell you, for example, that double negative means positive, but this is a statement about logic, not about language. If a child says, ‘I didn’t eat nothing,” who but an idiot would ask, ‘Was it good?’”

The youngster’s sentence is probably common when spoken, but if it had been written down on paper, editors would likely gasp. When things are recorded with ink and paper (or toner), there is a real permanence to them, so things must be correct before they are saved to the hard disk. If the rules aren’t followed, especially with things such as punctuation, mass confusion can soon erupt. That is definitely not what you want when people read your writing.

Spelling is another example of a hard rule. Except for variations found in the dictionary, spelling rules should not be broken, although some people (proponents of phonetic spelling) have tried it in the past with little luck. As members of the business community, most JFAM readers should know the difference between “insure” and “ensure.” You should because insurance is such a large component of the financial industry. When it comes to spelling it, though, there seems to be some confusion. “Insure” is used only when referring to insurance, whether it be auto, health, life or any of its other forms. “Ensure” means to make certain or guarantee. An example is “the insurance agent should ensure that the customer is covered by the policy.”

Historically, these words go back centuries. “Ensure” dates to the time around 1385. “Insure” is not nearly so old, having been coined as recently as 1533, and is defined as an “engagement to marry.” Its use as a commercial word, in which it was a “security against loss or death in exchange for payment,” started in 1651.

This may all seem pretty mundane if you have a basic understanding of the precepts, but the fact is that many people, well-educated though they may be, still manage to do these and other silly things like put periods and commas outside quotation marks. My response? Don’t do that! Periods and commas always go inside the marks. What makes it confusing is that colons and semicolons are placed outside. 

But how strict should these rules be? Are they an absolute end-all, inscribed in a marble block that cannot be modified or challenged? Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it.” As an editor, I can say that not everyone who minds it is a fool, but Thoreau realized that there should be a measure of tolerance for those who sometimes stretch them a bit. Just remember that if it is done once in a text, it should be done every single time.