Expecting more, paying less
Target’s slogan now is “Expect More. Pay less.” This has always bugged me.
A comparative adjective like more takes two semantic arguments: that item which is “more” (i.e., that which there are many of), and the standard of comparison (i.e., that which there is not so much of). So you have more books than I do, more books than magazines, and so on. If you omit either of these, they must be contextually retrievable. So if you say that you have more slotted spoons, then there must be some established number of slotted spoons that exist somewhere, or there must be some number of other items to which the spoons are being compared (in number and in type). If you say you have more than him, then whatever you have more of must be available immediately to everyone involved (either that, or you’ll get asked “of what?” straight away).
So when Target says “expect more,” I wonder: more of what, and more than what? The first is one or all of: products, helpful people, or abstractly, “a better experience.” But more than what? This is where I get tripped up. I always interpret this as “if you go to Target, you will (inevitably) end up expecting more.” But clearly this can’t be what they mean. It must be “you (should) expect more (good things from your shopping experience), so you should come to Target.” A bit convoluted, I say. The second part, pay less works fine for me: if you go to Target, you will pay less. It also works with the convoluted interpretation. But what they don’t want it to mean is something like: “consider how much you pay at Target: you should pay less (than that).”
A similar thing happened with Blockbuster’s “The end of late fees. The start of more.” Consider a parallel construction: “you have less money, but I have more.” This clearly means that “I have more money,” not “more of some other contextually salient item.” So one might be tempted to read Blockbuster’s slogan as “…the beginning of more late fees.” Of course, since they are explicitly ending them (rather than making them less; though the facts of their no-late-fees policy is rather tricky, but that’s beside the case), you either (1) get an incomprehensible reading, where they are both ending and starting late fees, or (2) interpret “more” as “more good stuff.”
In a related case, bed retailer Levitz has a commercial where they talk about some expensive bed, and the voiceover says (paraphrasing): “Is $400 a good price for this luxury bed? At Levitz, it’s a great price!” This is what happens when you want to stick in adverbial modifiers like “at Levitz,” all willy-nilly. What they’ve done (if I remember the commercial correctly), is relativized the evaluation of “great price” to being at Levitz. So what this means is that “at $400 dollars, this mattress is a good deal, if you’re only thinking about buying at Levitz.” The implication is that at some other location, $400 for the same item would be outrageously expensive. I’m pretty sure that’s not what they meant. The problem is that they already introduced the price. If they had just said, “at Levitz, the price is great: just $400,” everything would be okay. Oh well. I’m sure they didn’t lose any business over it.
I tend to interpret this sort of advertising slogan as “… compared what you used to”, i.e. “Expect more (from us now than you used to expect from us)”.
Uh, compared to.
I always interpret this as “You should expect more [general good stuff from your hypermart] than you’re currently expecting. You should pay less than you’re currently paying. [To achieve both of these goals], you should come to Target.” This definitely never gave me a second thought, semantically.
As for Blockbuster, it’s a very dumb slogan. And Levitz…. wow, I haven’t seen that but it’s incredibly amazing.
Chris: ahh, I didn’t think of that. So it could have been “expect more now.” Sounds like it’d work better if there’s a clear rebirth/reopening of the store, etc.
Klinton: I agree, except IIRC I always hear the phrase as “Target. Expect more. Pay less” with an implitic colon between “Target” and the rest. So it sounds to me like the phrases are relativized to Target, rather than just about consumers in general. I could be remembering wrong, or misinterpreting periods/pauses as colons where I shouldn’t be.
The really frightening thing is that these kinds of slogans seem to work even though no one clearly understands what they mean.
It’s “clearly” something like this — expect more from your shopping experience than you are used to, and pay less than you would expect to pay for this superior experience. The fact that the slogan hasn’t been made a mockery by the TV comic crowd means the general sense of the phrase is obvious, even though the exact meaning is a bit vague.
Well, I realize that all of the slogans I brought up are non-problematic for most people, and that even I was able to grasp the meaning of, for instance, “Expect more. Pay less,” once I was able to take off my linguist hat. It is probably at least to some degree intentional that these slogans are vague. As long as they point in the right direction (i.e., “we are a good place for you to take your business”), people’s imaginations will go the rest of the way. Something like “at [our place], you’ll just get more” is suggestive enough that the actual substance of “more” can be left up to the viewer who feels like they have some need for “more.”
This is probably the curse of the expert. Those who think about language most also worry most when something unexpected comes by; those who worry themselves about the nature of knowledge/truth/existence (like philosophers) also likely are most concerned about, say, whether they actually know anything or not. It’s something that ordinary people just don’t worry about, since it’s perfectly possible to move around the world and interact with people without wondering: “is knowledge illusory?” (as they say, a philosopher is someone who kicks up dust and then complains they can’t see; I wonder what the analogous statement is for linguists)
You can definitely count me among the nonprofessionals, but I like to kick up dust as well. Those who don’t wonder if knowledge is illusory are missing something, even if the something is nothing. For linguists, how about “talking incessantly and then complaining they can’t hear.” (Not that I want you to stop talking.)