I don't want to reveal too much of my personal life, of course, but I have to admit that from watching two-hour blocks of Daily Show/Colbert Report/Scrubs re-runs each weekday, I've seen this commercial for Astrive student loans somewhere on the order of twenty times. (Somewhat less than the Ditech commercial that admonishes me with "people are smart", but somewhat more than the Best Buy commercial where the dad hides his daughter's backpack to prevent her from going to college.)
One non-linguistic thing that bothers me about the commercial first: one of its claims is that an astrive loan is better than borrow from a "high-interest credit card". Nothing like informing us that your offer is better than the worst possible solution. Might as well say "better than paying for college by running small jobs for the Mob". Or "eating our hamburgers is more nutritious than subsisting on Crisco."
Returning to the linguistic point I wanted to make originally, the friendly narrator who keeps on talking down to me says at one point that college costs "major dollars... GRANDE dollars." This seems weird in a few ways:
1. It's highly nonstandard to use major to modify a plural noun.
2. It's highly nonstandard to use grande to modify a plural noun.
3. There is a standardized Spanish borrowing into English with the same meaning as grande dollars: mucho dinero.
So it's sort of a neologism,
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1 comment:
Maybe it's 'dollars' that's being used oddly here -- to mean 'money.'
'It costs major money' would sound like someone trying to be noticed, but 'It takes major effort' sounds almost normal.
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