You all remember just a few weeks ago when Sony ripped away a bunch of movies and TV shows people “owned”? This ad is on Amazon. You can’t “own” it on Prime. You can just access it until they lose the license. How can they get away with lying like this?
You can save up to 77% if you buy now.
you can never save by buying something. I save if I don’t buy.
You’re playing a semantics game though. The assumption is that you ARE going to buy the thing. Society has decided that “save 77%” is a valid shortening of “save 77% compared to buying at full price” because that is the most logical comparison to make. Yes. “Save 77% compared to not buying the item” makes no sense, but that is clearly not what is being implied here. Implying and inferring things is a normal part of human communication, and refusing to accept the implications doesn’t make you clever.
That said, I agree that “pay 77% less to not even actually own the product that we will eventually lose the license to” is dumb.
That is what they pretend it is, but sales like that are intended to be FOMO to convince people who were reluctant to buy ‘just in case because it is so cheap’. Like not even someone who balks at the price, just someone doesn’t want to risk changing their mind later.
That is how companies entice people to buy things they were not even interested in before the sale.
For sure. An implied sense of false urgency is the point of sales in general. There’s all sorts of psychology around manipulating people into buying things.
I just think that acting as if there is some sort of grammatical error or gap in logic is missing the fact that in language, people imply things. And an ad implying “you’re going to buy this, so you better do it while costs less” isn’t too hard to follow.
Sure, but that’s the assumption created by the advertisement. If you’re debating buying something, and the ad says “You can save up to 77% if you buy now” then suddenly the presupposition is (sneakily!) introduced that you are going to buy it. In that case, identifying and rejecting the presupposition is the smarter thing to do.
It’s smarter, but only if you don’t really care about getting the thing since not buying means you don’t get the thing
Yes. And that is the point of ads. And we can agree that it’s not great to manipulate consumers.
but “you can never save by buying something. I save if I don’t buy” is NOT identifying the presupposition, and therefore not rejecting the presupposition. It’s just stating that the original statement has a logical flaw. Which it doesn’t have any logical flaws if you accept that language has subtext.
“I dislike that the implication is that you can only compare to buying at full price, when there are other options like not buying (which saves 100% vs full price)” identifies the presupposition and rejects it.
Statement 1: “You can save up to 77% if you buy now”
Statement 2: “you can never save by buying something. I save if I don’t buy”
Statement 2a: “save 77% compared to buying at full price”
Statement 2b: “Save 77% compared to not buying the item”
Statement 2’s first use of “save” suggests that of Statement 2a, and Statement 2’s second use of “save” suggests that of Statement 2b. Statement 1’s use of the word “save” corresponds to that of Statement 2a. I don’t think we disagree on the semantics, though we may be phrasing things a little differently.
I agree that the original poster was playing a semantics game; indeed, I interpret Statement 2 as follows.
Interpetation A: Statement 2 is a witticism that plays off the contextual use of the word “save”. Specifically, the humorous force of Statement 2 is in its reinterpretation of the word “save”. Statement 2 is saying: “Statement 1’s use of the word ‘save’ is that of Statement 2a, but I choose to reinterpret Statement 1’s use of the word ‘save’ to that of Statement 2b!”
Comment 1: The reinterpretation performed by Statement 2 is mildly subversive in that it rejects Statement 1’s interpretation of ‘save’.
Comment 2: The reinterpretation performed by Statement 2 is mildly empowering in that it performs a reinterpetation of ‘save’ to the benefit of the writer.
You say “refusing to accept the implications doesn’t make you clever”. There’s a bit of an aesthetic judgment to the “doesn’t make you clever” part which we can agree to disagree on. But Interpretation A does not depend on “refusing to accept the implications”. Rather, it accepts the implication, and subverts it to provide the effects described in Comments 1 and 2.
Note: The original post that started this discussion seems to be unavailable apparently because the original poster (I am not the original poster) deleted it. I believe we are just discussing among ourselves.