Cigarette smoking and TOS

[Christopher]

I confess: I can't get used to "fail" as a noun, as in "epic fail!"

We already have a word for that: "failure."

This thread is full of win.

Actually those don't bother me, for some reason. "Epic fail" works for me because it has a better rhythm than "epic failure" -- maybe that's why it evolved in the first place.

I'm also rather fond of the phrase "made of awesome," which was fashionable a few years back. It's just so funny.

"Morph" as a verb used to be nails/chalkboard for me, primarily because I was busy looking down my nose about Power Rangers at the time. I'm not sure if that show coined the term or if it existed before.

They didn't coin it, although it hadn't been around for long when the show premiered. I'm sure you're familiar with "morphing" as a special-effects term, the computer graphic effect of gradually transmuting one image into another -- that's where it first originated. I know the term was coined sometime between 1988 and 1991, because when the technique was first used in George Lucas's Willow, it was called "splining" (a spline being a mathematical term for the path an image element traversed between its starting and ending points, or something like that), but by the time it was featured in Michael Jackson's "Black and White" music video and in Terminator 2 (and for Martia's shapeshifting in The Undiscovered Country), it was referred to as morphing. Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers debuted in 1993 and no doubt used the name because those prior works had popularized the term "morphing" and it was considered cutting-edge and fashionable. Although MMPR didn't do any actual morphing effects until its second season.

 

[Silvercrest]

I had no real knowledge of industry terms back then, I'm afraid. I didn't know "morphing" was used with those other works or that it was already popular by the time of MMPR.

Or "splining" in that sense either, though ironically enough I had a job at a door/window factory that had me learn "spline" in a different context. In 1993.

<cough cough> Cigarettes are the topic, not grammar.

Um. Morphing. TUC effects. Martia. Someone cited Martia as smoking in that movie. Okay, we're back on topic. Was that two degrees of separation from the topic, or three?

And Maurice, you should do something about that cough.
You don't smoke, do you?

 

[plynch]

I had the same problem back in college when "My bad" caught on. That was fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Your bad what? Nouns! Where are the nouns?

One of my favorite Trek novelists would advise you to stop pretending your English is better than that of the masses.

 

[Christopher]

It wasn't elitism, just incomprehension. I couldn't understand how a pair of adjectives in isolation could form a meaningful phrase. I was left dangling in suspense for a noun that never came.

 

[plynch]

"My wrong" would work, though.

It never bothered me since the sense was plain (like the mind-waste one that irked my mom).

 

[BoredShipCapt'n]

<cough cough> Cigarettes are the topic, not grammar.

Yeah, but grammar is better for you.

And I cannot for the life of me figure out what "Imagine Greater" is supposed to mean. Will someone please get Syfy a noun??

Every time I see that phrase I think, "I can imagine any number of things greater than what you're doing!" It's positively Pavlovian by now.

My Pavlovian response is "That doesn't mean anything!"

While I enjoy pooping on meaningless syntax as much as anyone, I feel obliged to point out that the construction "imagine greater" is no different from "expect better," and we all understand what that means. "Better" or "greater" here is used as a nominal adjective.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

While I enjoy pooping on meaningless syntax as much as anyone, I feel obliged to point out that the construction "imagine greater" is no different from "expect better," and we all understand what that means. "Better" or "greater" here is used as a nominal adjective.

If it weren't for the major objection already identified, which is that it would be self-defeating for the slogan to imply that we should be imagining a channel with greater offerings than what SyFy is providing us, then I would agree that there are literally no differences between the two constructions. It's only because the implications don't make sense in the context of a slogan that reading it that way gets called into question and it remains a head-scratcher.

Or to put it another way, perhaps they really are the same construction, but one is full of win and the other is full of fail.

 

[Silvercrest]

it would be self-defeating for the slogan to imply that we should be imagining a channel with greater offerings than what SyFy is providing us

And yet ... it succeeded.

Congratulations, SyFy. You've made me push the envelope. You've caused me to expand my mind beyond the boundaries of human imagination. I've learned to imagine greater than you, by forcing and straining at the very fabric of --

Okay, let's be honest. It wasn't that hard.

 

[Christopher]

While I enjoy pooping on meaningless syntax as much as anyone, I feel obliged to point out that the construction "imagine greater" is no different from "expect better," and we all understand what that means. "Better" or "greater" here is used as a nominal adjective.

I never thought of that. I guess in both cases there's an implied "something" in the middle.

 

[Shaka Zulu]

There are DVDs filled with old commercials that are sold for big bucks all the time.

Where can I find these DVDs, and who sells them?

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I see NO ONE has mentioned John St. Talbot. Who is HOT.

 

[MikeS]

I see NO ONE has mentioned John St. Talbot. Who is HOT.

Erm, they did. Long before the thread got derailed.

 

[plynch]

and there's this newfangled youtube thingy that has lots of old ads on it too

 

[Greg Cox]

I see NO ONE has mentioned John St. Talbot. Who is HOT.

Because no one wants to remember that movie.

 

[Robert Comsol]

Don't be silly. Everyone knows the best cigarettes come from Mother Russia. Chekov says so.

But did he ever try one of these Kaspek cigarettes?

(these are these cigarettes where what looks like the filter is the actual tobacco and the white part is a straw, so you could smoke these with hand gloves on)

That would have been a sound reason not to feature smoking in TOS. Russian and other Soviet audiences would have wondered why people in the future were smoking cigarettes backwards.

Bob

 

[Christopher]

I see NO ONE has mentioned John St. Talbot.

If you mean David Warner's character, it's St. John (pronounced "Sinjen") Talbot.

 

[Maurice]

Speaking of eastern bloc cigs, I recently used a single 1989 vintage East German f6 cigarette to symbolize a bygone era in a screenplay I was hired to rewrite.

 

[treknician1701]

There are DVDs filled with old commercials that are sold for big bucks all the time.

Where can I find these DVDs, and who sells them?

Oh, man, I have seen them on Ebay all the time! But just because I mentioned them here, they possibly won't have any, hehehehe. But you can try, do a search. And check out Youtube, as was said, I found a couple of old TREK commercials on there.

Maurice:
Hey, man, whatever happened to your website? I thought that it was really great with all that stuff, and really nice displays, then one day, it was GONE!!!

Greg

 

[plynch]

Got the below for a Xmas present a while back. Good selection, organized by types of products. Some are OUT there.

http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Comme...391556141&sr=8-3&keywords=classic+commercials

 

[Maurice]

Maurice:
Hey, man, whatever happened to your website? I thought that it was really great with all that stuff, and really nice displays, then one day, it was GONE!!!

Huh? What website are you talking about?