WALKING ON CARPET

I was walking past a used car lot on Hollywood Boulevard, and being the language obsessive that I am, my eye was drawn to the words displayed on the windshields of the cars; shout lines, I suppose, or possibly selling lines.  All of them were hand painted in good old fashioned signwriters’ script, the kind of thing you used to see on the windows of butchers and fruit shops.  You, or I, might have thought it was a dead art, but evidently not.

This was cheering in some small way but then I started wondering, did the person who did the painting have to come up with the words?  If not, who did?  Some hotshot salesman who thinks he knows what sells? 

And of course I also wondered whether the company had a stock of generic phrases that they used over and over again, or whether they were constantly trying to come up with new words, new combinations, new poetry.  I shall be keeping an eye on things as I walk past there in the future.

Then, at the weekend, I went to the annual LA Auto Show. I hadn’t been for years, and I can’t say I’d missed it much, but this seemed a reasonable moment in history to go and see what, if anything, had changed.

It was an interesting walking experience.  You walk slowly for miles, not quite lost but not quite knowing how to get where you want to be, surrounded by other slow moving, equally not-quite-lost walkers.  Much of the time you’re walking on some very fancy, and I suppose industrial grade, carpet.  Probably this makes the walking a bit easier. 

And of course there are the poor spokesmodels who have to stand by the cars hour after hour, and they probably don’t walk very far, but given those heels, their feet must be in tatters at the end of the day. In fact there were considerably fewer of these poor women than there used to be; progress, right?

There wasn’t a whole lot of language on display at the show, though such as there was had its raw appeal:

And you could also pick up some very expensively printed car brochures which were full of auto verbiage.  I learn for example that the GMC Terrain Denali “is the SUV reimagined with you in mind.”  Me?  You’d think they’d have told me sooner, wouldn’t you?  Anyway, none of this auto language was nearly as zesty or as much fun as that painted on the windshields of the cars on Hollywood Boulevard.  A lesson there for somebody.