Few can recall sponsors
of Super Bowl TV spots

     The Romero "Guess the Sponsor" contest is now in its 10th year. If you're in charge of advertising at any casino on earth (or even if you just grind out ads for another type of business) here's the deal. First, watch the Super Bowl's allegedly miraculous but mostly hopeless commercials. Then check this space on Feb. 11, and play "Guess the Sponsor." I write four or five descriptions of Super Bowl commercials, you read them, then try to remember who sponsored them. Sounds easy, right? You'll be lucky to get even one. This really is a contest for ad directors and creatives who think they know how to sell. But if their ad sponsors can't be recalled a day or so later, what good were the ads? Sounds absurd, but most viewers laugh when they see the invariably nonsensical spots but forget the sponsors in mere seconds. This is not the sort of advertising that sells anything, but sponsors seem to love it because it's funny. The ad agencies, of course, love it because they get commissions on spots that cost from 2.5 to 2.8 million for 30 seconds--and can't be tracked for effectiveness. Love--it's wonderful. P.S. Take the test on Feb. 11.

"Obamanough already"
say college wordsmiths

     Could Prof. William Strunk, Jr., the original author of "Elements of Style," handle today's English? I doubt it. He'd probably leave it to the word doctors at Lake Superior State University of Michigan. Last month these guardians of the language issued their 35th annual list of terms that deserve to be banned. Make sure you use none of the following: Heading the list we find "shovel-ready,' which come to think of it could come only from Washington, a city that leads the world in fraudulent snippets of speech. Also blacklisted were "unfriended," as in "He made me so mad I unfriended him on Facebook," also "sexting," "tweeting," "retweeting," "teachable moment," "toxic assets," "transparency," "czar" and "stimulus that's too big to fail." In the overused category we find "Omabacare" and "Obamanomics." " We say Obamanough already," said the Lake Superior State wordsmiths.

The Elements
of Style
still reigns

     E.B.. White, the co-author of "The Elements of Style," was a student at Cornell in 1919, and happened to take an English class from Prof. William Strunk Jr. The coursebook, named "The Elements of Style," was written by Prof. Strunk. White enjoyed the class and the book and moved on with his life. Thirty eight years later a major publisher hired him to revise the book for the college market (Prof. Strunk had died). Commenting on his first revision in 1957, White said:

--"It was Will Strunk's parvum opus, his attempt to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin. It was a 43-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English."

     Several editions have been written by White and "The Elements of Style" remains a masterpiece. Writers who don't have this book aren't writers.

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