I’m watching a conversation on Twitter, started by @AuthoressAnon. Here’s the original message:
TWEET TO ME: Color of your pants + the last thing you ate or drank = BAND NAME. Ready….GO!
Have some more responses filter in and then:
Also I can’t believe how many PANTLESS PEOPLE are out there. o_O Dudes, shorts and skirts count, ok?
The thread itself is very funny, but that one statement got me thinking…
I don’t know what it’s like in other countries, but once upon a time in the US, if you went into a fast food joint, the menu was almost all text. Once upon a time being less than ten years ago. It’s still true in some places. They have one of those spiffy menus with the words on it, and prices next to it, and it’s spelled out what you can order.
But I walk into a place like McDonalds, and it’s almost all pictures. The menu is 90% photos. Starbucks drivethrus are the worst I’ve seen. They don’t even list half the stuff they’re selling, because there’s not enough for pictures of all of it. And really, it’s coffee. A vanilla latte looks an awful lot like (or identical to) a regular latte, but there are pictures of both up there.
Back to the Twitter conversation. It seems like lately I’ve come across a lot of people who don’t grasp basic metaphor, hyperbole, or non-literal slang.
For instance, I say “She didn’t appreciate the main course of asshat with a side of douchery telling her where she couldn’t and couldn’t sit and read.”
This is a cynical, crude, and very tongue-in-cheek reference (which I think you all already knew 😉
And I have encountered far too many people lately who take a statement like that literally. No, I’m not exaggerating. They want to know why she was eating asshat, and who was serving douchery, and why it talked.
And I’ve been wondering, is this just something I’m seeing more of because I’m sensitive to it, or is it actually becoming a more wide-spread issue? And is it related at all to the fact that so many of our fast food menus have become picture books? Or am I taking the entire situation too literally?
Kids These Days. It’s not your imagination. We’re becoming less language oriented. In other words, we’re becoming more what the world was for a long, long time–a overclass that can read quickly and accurately and retain information–and everyone else, who has to believe what the overclass tells them. Universal literacy is a relatively weird historical phenomenon. I don’t want to go back to feudalism OR forward to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, though, so I hope something happens to break the trend.
I was thinking about this during dinner and it made me realize I’m totally a guilty part. But when it comes to food, if I haven’t eaten it before, unless you really write word for word in an amazing description, I’d rather have a picture. Even with the description, I’d probably still want a picture. I’m going to think about this every time I see a menu for the next month.
I honestly haven’t noticed an uptick in literalism-I feel like, at least on the interwebs, it’s always been there (although maybe people are getting more vocal about it?) I wonder if it’s regional? There’ve been studies done about literacy rates in different parts of the country, and it’d be interesting to see if major corporations are inclined to put up pictures rather than text on their menus in certain locales. Anyway.
Oh, and saw your name on the Entangled pitch request-congrats!
Not going to lie, I laughed at your cynical, crude, tongue-in-cheek reference. I thought it was hilarious. Then again, a lot of my friends speak in the language of sarcasm so I am used to it.
Perhaps with restaurant menus, there has been a greater spike in graphic design and the advertising industry. People have discovered how powerful images can be. I actually did my own research study in a class this past semester, and I found that people’s purchasing habits were indeed affected by the type of ads they were exposed to, particularly visual versus textual. So there you go!
~Wendy Lu
The Red Angel Blog
Hey Lori, I just tagged you for a MeMe on my blog if you are interested
I found you! The points you bring up are really good ones (and your example sentence hilarious ;). I don’t think I could’ve made it through my film degree without having a HUGE appreciation for images and the power behind them, but obviously as a writer, I can’t appreciate words enough. And I’m a painter, so I know a lot can be said about imagery. But there’s a difference between a piece of art, and a photo of a frappucino 😉
I hadn’t thought about the menus thing but it’s the same here in the UK. It kind of seems like dumbing down, to me. From my own experience, when a restaurant menu has beautiful photos (to go ALONG with the descriptions) of meals, it helps my decision. (Or if the photos are posted outside on the window and are nasty looking, I don’t go in 😉 I think there’s a happy medium but as a society we seem to be headed the other way.