![]() ![]() ![]() There’s an Australian cleaning product called Handee (“towel in a box”) which has for at least a year been using the punchline “I love how far this spill is spreading, said no one ever.”Īnd finally, the Chicago Transport Authority launched a $5m campaign earlier this year, designed to persuade 20-somethings to use public transport, and which, over the photo of parking space, ran the tagline, ‘I love paying $30 for parking!’ said no one ever”. (I’m referring mainly to the 2014 campaign for Manhattan Mini-Storage, which, over a photo of a chaotic New York apartment, ran the tagline “’it looks like this because I’m planning on buying a pig,’ said no one, ever.”) The vanguard, as far as I can tell, were those companies who pride themselves on always being ahead of the pack – that is, those who advertise on the New York City subway system – and who have been using “said no one, ever” since the end of last year. (Or, in a move that exhausts me just to think about, it will start to be used as a knowingly bad joke, delivered inside double sets of air quotes.)įor now, however, the phrase is dying on the beach and if you need further persuading, Carnival isn’t the first corporate advertiser to use it. They were! And it is possible that someone brainy will think of a way to subvert the current usage of “said no one ever” and move the joke along. I’m not suggesting that these locutions were never funny. Then, I would suggest, the bathetic “so that happened”, usually accompanied by a link to something wonderful, gruesome or utterly unbelievable and creating just the right level of po-faced irony to make everyone feel thoroughly pleased with themselves. At the top, obviously, is the Twitter meta-comment, once funny, now not funny. But there are many others, all of which turn on a kind of entry-level sarcasm redolent of the end-times we live in, and all of which are approaching retirement. “Said no one ever” is the most obvious of these witticisms. As a result, there has been a boom in stock phrases that even the most inept user can deploy, safe in the knowledge that at least one person on his or her timeline won’t have seen it before and will come away thinking their friend is Voltaire. Thanks to digital media, there is a greater premium on written language than at any time since the 18 th century and for millions of users, one’s online reputation rises or falls on the ability to make relatively sophisticated written-down jokes. The difference, these days, is that these hilarities are all written down. Before the joke expired, use of “said no one ever” was just the evolution of sticking “not” on the end of a sentence, that childish craze of the late 1990s which was itself an extension of the playground game of bending double with laughter whenever someone said something and yelling “It’s opposites day!” in their face. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |