Huh?
This reminds me – I watched a bit of TV over the weekend and just about every damn commercial break featured this bit of torture called the “Potty Dance.” Ugh! Toddlers singing and dancing in their diapers like some depraved episode of Barney & Friends…
Honest, I don’t normally have thoughts about hurting children, but this horrifying abomination makes me want to slap the ever-lovin’ crap out of every last one of 'em.
Grammatically, that should be, “Don’t you wish there were …”
They’re supposing a condition different than is the case. Use were, not was.
This also bugs me, and I think it’s a classic case of someone trying to be ironic and getting lost up his own ass. The commercials show the truck doing stuff I know the truck can’t do- stuff I would never for a second believe any truck could do. Why is that supposed to make me want the truck? Because I’m going to want to pretend I could do those things?
Uncontroversially seconded.
So you mean it should be “I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener”?
nm
That’s how I’ve always heard it.
If we’re talking about the same commercials, I think the disclaimer might have been legally mandated. The one I see running now has a truck doing barrel rolls in the snow, and you would have to be an idiot to think it could really do that. But a few months ago, they were running an ad that showed a truck pushing a dune buggy up a steep sand dune.
I don’t think that one had a disclaimer, and if you have never driven in deep sand, it wasn’t so obvious that what you were seeing was impossible. So I’d guess they got a warning from somebody to start running disclaimers, and maybe the new commercial is a deliberate attempt to make disclaimers look stupid and unnecessary.
Additional evidence for my theory is that in the barrel-roll commercial, the disclaimer is in large, legible type. Disclaimers they don’t really want you to see are usually in type so small that you need a 60" HDTV to have a prayer of reading them, and even then only with a DVR that lets you freeze the picture.
Hmm . . . browsing on-line shows I have been mislead. Wait, does that mean we found a song with correct grammar?!
I still see that one sometimes. I don’t know what order they were produced in, although I thought I saw the one with the airplane first. Maybe the disclaimer isn’t part of the joke, but I still think it’s a really stupid commercial.
But they all kind of are. How stupid do you have to be to think you’ll have to fight off women if you use Axe Body Spray?
No, they seem to be supposing a product (singular). I have no idea of what grammar rule you two are talking about.
I suspect there’s some verbiage indicating that the adverse reaction must be significantly overreported in the test cohort versus the control cohort.
I thought when you said airplane, you were talking about the truck doing the barrel roll. I just realized that you were talking about a third commercial, where an airliner has its landing gear disabled, and a truck pulls in front of it on the runway and saves the day.
Yeah, I think that was the first of the series, and I don’t think it had a disclaimer, either. But not very many people were likely to try that stunt. I can see a lot of dumb guys taking their new truck out in the sand and getting stuck, and then angrily phoning the FCC or whatever about the deceptive advertising.
That’s just plain silly. Neither word (“was or were”) would lead to any doubt as to meaning, and the ‘rule” (and there are no rules in English Grammar) is confusing and overly complex. “I wish there was” = 49,000,000 results, but “I wish there were” has only 27,800,000- so usage sez “was” wins.
Indeed this forum agrees:
“Older, prescriptive grammar books insist on the use of the subjunctive form “were”. Most modern, descriptive grammar books accept both “were” and “was” as being grammatically acceptable, but they suggest that “I wish I were” is more appropriate in formal contexts.”
And
“The older prescriptive grammars were simply wrong. Their analysis was wrong and the proof they offered was wrong. It was just one more rule that was wrong from the outset. The rule actually changed hundreds of years ago and yet these prescriptive grammars kept on misanalyzing this for centuries.”
If you don’t want to use the subjunctive, I don’t think you are committing a felony, and I would say that someone’s comments about being raised by wolves is a bit harsh.
But if you had no idea that the subjunctive mood existed, then a gap in your education has been filled, and you should be happy about that.
I don’t like those commercials, but I can at least accept that that’s an exaggeration of “Axe smells good.” What does pretending to land a plane using a truck bed have to do with the truck?
Yeah, but I’d hit that Egg McMuffin.
Marley, you don’t remember The 405?