Minor Rant, just for the heck of it:
There’s this commercial where some twenty-something gets up at dawn (yeah, I know; as if!) and pours himself a bowl of cereal when suddenly - oops! no milk. He wanders out on a hillside where a large bovine is placidly chewing grass in the dawn light and wishing his agent had booked him in a decent western and not this crummy commercial.
Meanwhile, two more twenty-somethings (and why do you guys all try so hard to look like smart-ass punks, anyway?) enter the kitchen. They are a couple, and the viewer suspects the three characters here are tuckered out from a long night of menage-a-troising and have grown peckish for a bowl of Raisin Bran to replace their after-sex cigarettes, since no one smokes anymore.
The female punk looks out the window at the guy harassing the poor ruminant, and asks her commerade: “Do you think we should tell him that’s a boy-cow?”
Well, Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahaha. I could just shit.
Now this commercial is no more inane than most, but what is with that “boy-cow” thing? Boy-cow?! Obviously, the advertisers were afraid the word “bull” would be too subtle for us, and we might miss the joke. After all, aren’t twenty-somethings hip, cool, urbanites one and all? There aren’t a lot of tongue-piercing parlors in the corn fields of Nebraska. Despite being basic English vocabulary since Beowulf was king of the Geats, the precise meaning of the word “bull” is considered an SAT challenge by the target demographic, here, clearly. If I could remember what this thing is a commercial for (milk, probably, or maybe cereal, or possibly bull semen) I wouldn’t buy it anymore.
There are lots of commercials that condescend this way, we have just become desensitized to how insulting they are. Feel free to share favorites.
Minor rant finished.