This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are.

The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body.

What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such.

How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality.”

We can destroy only as creators. — But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things.”

{ Nietzsche, Gay Science, II, 58, 1882 }

I read that Pepsi has a new stupid tagline: “More happy”

It comes with a comment from the extremely self-contented marketing VP: “One of the nice things about the word ‘happy’ is it’s really multidimensional”

This guy shouldn’t be running a lemonade stand, but rewriting the whole oxford dictionary.

By trademarking the language, I think advertising people and brands rape the words, manipulate their values, and impoverish the language. They repeat their self-aggrandized lie (you DON’T become “more happy” just by drinking Pepsi) hundreds of times and create new fake meanings for the words they use. (…)

Advertising is a fancy word for pavlovian conditioning: after seeing Eternity associated with Calvin Klein a thousand times, the word Eternity is no longer the vivid (multidimensional) word it should have stayed.

In 1986, on his wedding day, Calvin Klein gave his wife a diamond ring inscribed with the word Eternity. They divorced in 2006, so technically, ck’s Eternity equals 20 years.

{ stereohell | Continue reading }