The other Blackberry producers
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.
Comments(1)
I agree that the phrase is odd, and I think I know why.
A phrase like “the world’s first Apple store” is okay because it makes a reference to one individual instance of a class of things called “Apple stores” — as in “the world’s first Apple store was opened in New York in 1998″.
The phrase “the world’s first touchscreen Blackberry” would also be okay if it were used in a similar sentence: “the world’s first touchscreen Blackberry was bought in a store in Chicago last Friday”, for example.
But that clearly isn’t the interpretation the advertiser intended. The ad is trying to make a reference to the whole class of things called “touchscreen Blackberries”, rather than to a single individual of that class. This is where the semantic oddity arises: touchscreen Blackberries can only be made by RIM by definition, so it is odd of RIM to claim that they were the first to start making them.