Advertisements in print usually have an asterisk (*) somewhere, leading to the small print. The purpose of this section, as I understand it, is to allow the advertiser room to wriggle out of whatever offer has been promised. ‘Conditions apply’ is a term, which can be used in most situations.
So, the offer to swap your old phone for a brand new one is just a ruse to reduce the price of the new phone by some small amount; the sale, which advertises 50 per cent off, just offers you up to 50 per cent off (everything you want is, of course, reduced by a whopping 10 per cent) and so on. It is hardly surprising — any business offering such unstinted largesse as ads would indicate, would soon find itself bankrupt.
Perhaps, the most commonly available offers are the ones where purchasing one product can get you something else as well. ‘Buy one get one free’ (or buy two, of three, depending on the product) is the most basic form of this, but there are plenty of others. You can buy, however, many bars of soap and receive a free loofah/tube of toothpaste/facewash, or get a jar or pasta sauce with two packets of pasta. Your box of cereal (or kid’s meal pack from major fast food chain) may contain a collectible figurine with the challenge of collecting all six varieties. During my own extreme youth, people collected ‘tazos’ — little discs of plastic that could be slotted into each other and launched at each other.
Such offers are usually accompanied by a particular disclaimer, the wording of which, makes my blood boil. It is this — offer open till stocks last. This sentence is all over ads across the country and it simply does not make sense. What is this supposed to mean? Reading this sentence one might be forgiven for thinking that the offer is only open as long as there is no stock.
The problem seems to be a lack of understanding of the words ‘till’ and ‘until’, and the phrase ‘as long as’. The first two refer to a specific point in the future. ‘As long as’, on the other hand, refers to a state of existing in the present and will continue until a point in the future. So the concept of stock ‘lasting’, or continuing to be available, can only be combined with ‘as long as’, or some similar phrase. ‘Offer open while stocks last’ makes perfect sense. But the juxtaposition of the words ‘till stocks last’ is meaningless enough to give any reader a headache.
It seems particularly strange that this phrase should have caught on so widely, when one considers that the entire point of a disclaimer is for the purpose of legally weaselling out of things. One would assume that precision of language was particularly important in such a situation.
But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps companies are taking the disclaimer a step further by explaining their offers in terms that are fundamentally nonsensical. This may seem a far-fetched explanation (since most follow this track, are we to assume they have all been conspiring against us?) but the alternative is to believe that every advertiser in India talks complete rubbish. And surely that can’t be true?
— bluelullaby@gmail.com