It's Twenty-Ten, not Two-Thousand and Ten
Well, here we are in a new year. As a few people who’ve read this blog know by now, it’s Twenty-Ten here in RandyWorld, not Two-Thousand and Ten. And while I won’t continue to beat that drum so loudly as to become annoying, I will point out that in recent days, I’ve been gratified to notice that the National Association of Good Grammar (NAGG), which, admittedly, is just one guy and a bunch of his co-horts who paid attention in grammar class, have gained some traction in the mainstream media after having decreed that, just as I said in a blog entry a few months ago, the correct way of pronouncing the year 2010 is “Twenty-Ten,” not “Two Thousand Ten.”
Being something of a grammar nerd myself (in high school, while the other kids were planning their keg parties, I was diagramming sentences), it has been a curious source of annoyance for me that after 1999 (pronounced “nineteen ninety nine”), we suddenly started referring to each year in the thousands. Last time I checked, 20 comes after 19, not 2000. But I’ll admit I wasn’t too good at math.
It’s also fair to point out that while most of us will choose to consider 2010 (however you pronounce it) as the first year in a new decade (just as we considered 2000 the first year of the decade that just ended), the truth is, 2010 is actually the last year of the previous decade, and the new decade doesn’t begin until 2011 — the first year in any decade being the year ending in “1,” since, after all, “1″ is where counting begins, right? But try and go back in time and tell that to all the 2000 revelers. Good luck with that. So, okay, even though it’s technically wrong, I’ll play along and consider 2010 the first year of the new decade.
And in so doing, I hope we can put to rest one of the most insipid radio slogans of all time: ”The best hits/mix/music of the ’80s, ’90s and now.” As all things slide forward, won’t that mean the stations that use that horrific slogan will soon have to change to “the best hits/mix/music of the ’90s, oh-oh’s and now.” And what will radio stations start calling the last decade if they’re to keep using that awful slogan? Did we just come out of the “oh’s” decade? The “oh-oh’s” decade? The “aught’s” decade? What? How will that insipid slogan evolve going forward?
“The best hits/mix/music of the ’90s, aughts and now?”
Dear God, help us.
And what about this new decade? What will they call this decade? The decade of the teens? The ones? The “onesies?”
“The best hits/mix/music of the ’90s, aughts and teens?”
Doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?
It’s just as well. I never liked that slogan in the first place. Of course I never much cared for any slogans when I was programming radio stations. Marketing weasels insist that slogans “position” you. I would argue they LIMIT you. They paint you into a corner.
I suppose that’s okay if you’re only going after 25-34, left-handed, albino hunchbacks living in your market’s two most upper income zip codes. But just how narrow a target is too narrow? Whatever happened to the go-for-the-jugular mindset of programmers who wanted only to WIN?
The worst slogan I ever heard (well, I didn’t actually hear it, but I did read it on a billboard) was when I was driving in Shreveport, Louisiana many years ago. A local top 40 station (I only knew the format because I’d seen the call letters in the trades) had a billboard campaign that went like this: Their call letters, which I’ll mercifully not mention here, followed by their slogan, which read, “It’s not what you think.”
What the hell does that mean? What did I think the station was to begin with? Since I’d never actually heard the station, I really didn’t think anything at all about it. But evidently, whatever I might have thought it was, it surely wasn’t that.
Reminds me of an old 1960s NBC-TV game show starring Tom Kennedy called You Don’t Say. Celebrities and their civilian contestant partners would construct sentences, leaving off the last word in hopes that their partner would finish the sentence. That missing world would be a syllable in a famous name, and as contestants gave these clues back and forth, they’d have to guess how these words fit into the mystery name. The team that guessed the mystery name won the round. Tom Kennedy would close the show each day with the line, “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts, it’s what you don’t say.”
So maybe this Shreveport radio station was subtly implying, “It’s not what you think that counts, it’s what you don’t think.”
More likely, it seemed to me, there just wasn’t much thinking going on at all in what passed for “strategy sessions” at that station.
The worst part of slogans like “The best hits/mix/music of…whenever” always seemed to me to be their inherent presumptuousness. Who, exactly, gets to decide if these songs they’re playing are the “best,” anyway? Apparently the radio station decides that, because as a listener, they sure as hell didn’t ask me. I know for sure some of the songs I heard sucked. (Abraham Lincoln would have made a fine radio programmer. He understood that you can’t please all the people all the time.)
No, I always felt like there ought to be more honesty in sloganeering. I mean, if you’re gonna resort to the sort of sloganeering that listeners inherently brush off as bullshit, then why not introduce some real honesty into the slogan?
For example, how about a radio station saying, “We play fewer songs that suck.”
Or how about a contest that goes, “We play only two songs per hour that suck. Your job is to identify them. And WIN!”
Probably wouldn’t work. But hey, it’s a new year.
Speaking of which, I’ve resolved to be a little more diligent in updating this blog on a somewhat more regular basis. I’m also working on doing a podcast or two, and I’ll have details on that when I have more to report.
Happy TWENTY-TEN!