Noncompositional

There’s something that’s been bothering me about some of the ads for the Blackberry Storm, the touchscreen version in the line of Blackberry smartphone products. In particular, the billboards that I’ve seen all proclaim

The world’s first touchscreen Blackberry

It’s perfectly true and even a good reason to pay attention to the product…but why does it seem strange (to me)? My first reaction to the ads (by which time I had already acquainted myself with the product), without any deep linguistic thoughts was: uh…is there someone else who’s going to make a touchscreen Blackberry?. It’s as though Apple announced the world’s first iPod with built-in FM tuner: no one else makes iPods, so why brag about being the world’s first.

And I think that’s what it was: the fact that they had “world’s first” made it seem as though there was the possibility that others were working to get their first whatever out the door, and RIM beat them to it. If you do a google search for “introduces the world’s first”, you get things like

• IT Data platform
• intelligent basketball shoe
• Touch-Screen WiFi-Integrated Digital Picture Frame
• touchscreen iPhone compatible car receiver

All cases where you might expect other variants to be coming out.

It’s not all that simple, though, because it does make sense to speak of the world’s first Apple store, or the world’s first Ford Mustang. But my intuition says that characterizations like these make more sense when spoken after the spread of such things, not right when they are introduced into the world.

On an interview with a CNN reporter, NY mayor Michael Bloomberg just said (basically exactly):

In Europe they spend two or three thousand dollars less per capita [on health care], but have a life expectancy of two or three thousand years more.

Clearly this man is unfit to lead.