Over the past week, for no sensible reason whatsoever, my brain has been trying to make a list of consumer product names that also function as complete, grammatical sentences. Usually this starts happening during the commute to work.
So far, the list is a pretty short one. Really short. Opal would probably object to its glaring deficiencies in the length department, if you know what I mean. But here it is then, in its entirety:
[ol]
[li]I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter — a butter substitute[/li][li]Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific — a brand of shampoo sold in the 1970s[/li][/ol]
It’s the first item that got me started on this. After a few minutes’ thinking about it, I remembered the second item. Then, I hit a wall. Can anyone think of some more?
Defunct products are perfectly fine, as you can see. Non-American products would be welcome as well.
I’m afraid I have to disqualify Shout! (a laundry detergent supplement), and others like it, as being bad form. Any grunt from Marketing can take a single verb and slap an exclamation mark on it, making a cheap imperative sentence. That doesn’t do it for me. Too low-brow. The sentence qua product name must have at least one subject and one verb.
There used to be a disposable litter-box called “Catch it!” - a bare-bones imperative sentence, and also the sort of homophonic pun that seemed a bit out-of-place at the local supermarket.
Looks like most products with sentence names date to the 1970s. Many restaurants of the era also had long names; “T.J. McPuffmeister’s Good Time Eatery, Drinkery and Ice Cream Works” and the like.
Gee, I really always thought it stood for This Can’t Be Yogurt. But that’s better than a friend’s mother, who thought it stood for Thank God It’s Yogurt. I mean, the initials don’t even match!
Hey, when we’re naming products here, should we keep to subject-verb sentences, or do fragments count?
I’ve known TCBY was The Country’s Best Yogurt so when I moved to Minneapolis and saw TCF Bank I immediately thought it must be The Country’s Finest Bank.
(i was wrong, it was Twin Cities Financial)
TCBY was This Can’t Be Yogurt Inc. - but only at the corporate level. All the trade dress said The Country’s Best Yogurt. I suspect legal got involved shortly after incorporation.
(I speak of TCBY in the past tense because I haven’t seen it anywhere in years.)
Another common sentence-tradename is “(blank) a (blank).” Etch a Sketch. Hide-a-Bed. Seal-a-Meal. These imperatives are not the simple “Shout!” variety. They at once describe the product, encourage you to use it - and often to remember it through a clever rhyme.