“. . . and it forced a bottled-water company to drop a pitch for “le fast drink des Alpes””
*the article is about the influnece of English language into French and they are discussing that Goverment have banned some resturant and food indusitires to stop using English words. *
Thanks,
I’m thinking it means an advertising pitch.
And what is that?
A pitch is a presentation of an idea, in this case an advertising/marketing idea.
Because of the apparent regulations against incorporating English words, this particular pitch had to be dropped.
Advertising Exec Wayne Brady: “How’s this for a slogan: ‘le fast drink des Alpes’”?
Advertising Firm Legal Department: “Sorry, the French Government has banned the use of English words.”
Advertising Exec Wayne Brady: “Is Wayne Brady going to have to drop a pitch!?”
There was (still is) an association in France that gets pissed off when English language is used in public. Back in the 80’s they sued Evian for using the slogan “Le fast drink des Alpes”. It is this sales “pitch” they had to drop.
Thank you all,
So you mean, " to drop a pitch" here means " to stop advertising such motto or phrase like this" ?
Right?
Correct, Evian had to stop an advertising campaign using that slogan.
Isn’t it an earlier stage, though? If it was already being used in ads that’d be a campaign. A pitch is just an idea/proposal still like **Bienville **explained.
Thanks a lot.
Oh, can you help me with this? Suppose that I wished to raise this question among my friends to have them find out the meaning, then if they simply search the question specially if they are good at searching with keywords " drop a pitch" they would find this thread in no time! How can I prevent them from not finding this answere over here! A penny for your thought !
One more thing, we say **in **the class, when the class is a public place where some people get together and learn something. right? what if it is a private class at people’s home or place. So which preposition should we use? Do we still say " **in **the class" or should we say " **at **the class" ?
Let me make an example, you have a pupil, you text them : " please answer the unit 4 and 5. tomorrow I will explain more in the class, or **at **the class"
And the class is their home / place.
I’d say “in the class” or just “in class”, not at the class.
The ad itself is a pitch. It’s pitching Evian to consumers.
How to stop searches from showing up? I don’t know how to control Google…
As for your preposition question, if you’re teaching a private pupil, I would consider it more of a “lesson” than a “class”. I would phrase it as, “I will explain more at/during your lesson”.
Pretty sure Evian is usually served in bottles not pitchers.
Yeah, but the bottle has a pitcher on it, looks kinda like the Alps.
Folks, the OP is just learning English. Witty wordplay is probably just going to confuse him/her.
“In the class” vs. “at the class”:
“At” usually refers to places, locations, etc. “In” has lots of meanings, but in this case refers to membership of a group. The student is in the group of students which, combined with a teacher, form the group called “a class”.
The important thing in the sentence “please answer the unit 4 and 5. tomorrow I will explain more in/at the class” is not where you are meeting, but rather the fact you’re meeting as a group for the purpose of teaching/learning. Said another way, the building address isn’t important; what you’re doing there is. So “in” works better.
Drop a pitch:
In sales, a “pitch” is a presentation or exhortation to a customer. e.g. “I’m going to pitch our product to the buyer over at Acme Corp today. I’ll be back late this afternoon.” In mass market advertising, it also refers to the whole advertising campaign: the themes, buzzwords, slogans, etc. e.g. “Our pitch will include lots of pretty girls and this really great jingle ‘blah blah … blah!’”.
Among many other meanings, “drop” means to stop using. And usually has a soft connotation of the stopping being an undesirable, unfortunate, or involuntary thing. e.g. “I had to drop golfing after I injured my foot.” “Drop” also has some connotation of suddenness. When you physically drop something it quickly crashes to the floor.
So putting it all together, Evian was forced against their will to suddenly stop using that advertising slogan, and they weren’t real happy about that.
I’ll just add that “pitch” in this sense is a metaphor drawn from baseball, where the “pitch” is the act of throwing the ball toward the batter to initiate play. Thus, in the business context, an advertising executive making a pitch to a company is throwing a set of ideas at them for a proposed ad campaign, and a company making a pitch to consumers is throwing reasons at them as to why they should buy its product.
To put a fine point on LSL Guy’s informative post: “Drop a pitch” is not actually an English idiom – rather, it is just an ordinary verb+object cnstruction. That means “drop a pitch” won’t really get much in a Google search. No more than “drop a pencil”, “drop a plate”, etc.
What does “We don’t have any light reading” mean in this paragraph?
China uses Esperanto to facilitate communication between speakers of its northern and southern dialects and supports an active publishing program. Many masterpieces of literature have been translated into Esperanto, including the Koran and some of Shakespeare’s plays. But Mary Davies, an Esperantist who runs a hotel in Heysham, England, complains, “We don’t have any light reading.”
“Light reading” in this case can mean texts that are not heavily-weighted in philosophy or religious ideas. Light reading could be general-interest magazine articles, romance or mystery novels, hobbyist publications, and so on.