4 ms·
“Just let some joy smoke sift into your system”
- nickpeterson 10y agoI wish hacker news allowed a short description of why something might be interesting... How about I take an hour and try to interpret this history of a Prince Albert advertising campaign?
- maxander 10y agoIt could be any number of things- insight into the history of smoking ads, the bygone culture of advertisement copy as poetry, or the bit about the "poetry of industrialism." But if you can read the words "BUT just among ourselves, you better start a rapid whiz system to keep tabs as to how fast you’ll buzz from low smoke spirits to TIP-TOP-HIGH" and not understand why someone thought it worth sharing, I don't know what to say.
- nickpeterson 10y agoFine, but a sentence would suffice, something akin to, 'Interesting older copy.' because this site is generally tech oriented, I often click a link and start reading assuming it will wrap around but after a few minutes it doesn't and I question the purpose of the link on hacker news...
- posterboy 10y agoThen, how about these descriptions: "long article on long winded text forms misses the point" or "... tries to prove a point" "ad copy by example's the charm" "author missing pulse of time reminisces on golden age" disclaimer: too long; didn't read
- DanBC 10y ago> because this site is generally tech oriented "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." has been in the guidelines for years.
- nickpeterson 10y agoLook, let it go, I've already exposed you as a Prince Albert shill.
- pimlottc 10y agoTo me, it's interesting to see that grammar-hacking wordplay Of this sort (a la doge meme) hiis not an entirely new phenomenon. And they're just fun to read.
- bicknergseng 10y agoThis comment is pretty funny juxtaposed with the one above regarding heavy copy in advertising.
- eropple 10y agoAlternatively, you could practice reading for effect and be better at doing it yourself. tl;dr culture is not a positive. Slow down.
- throwawaymaroon 10y agoyour illiteracy is not HN's problem
- __david__ 10y agoSo tobacco is what the "Do you have Prince Albert in a can" prank phone call is referencing? I've heard that forever and never knew why it was funny… I knew it was a double meaning, but the only Prince Albert I knew about was, um… something else (that wouldn't go in a can).
- smacktoward 10y agoYep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_(tobacco)#/media/File:Prince_Albert_Cigarettes.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_(tobacco)#/media...
- mcguire 10y agoAlso, Prince Albert and Middleton's Carter Hall are pretty decent, among the OTC/drug store/old codger blends. (Sir Walter Raleigh's texture reminds me of grape nuts, though.)
- mordechai9000 10y agoI found a gravel bar in Alaska where the river had deposited several battered, barely recognizable old Prince Albert cans. There was some other stuff, too, but nothing I could identify. A local told me that middens from miners in the 20s and 30s were eroding out of the riverbank upstream. Apparently they weren't considered to have any archaeological value, but it was interesting to poke around the old trash, anyway.
- fapjacks 10y agoI suppose technically, the PA we're thinking about could go in a can.
- tritosomal 10y agoThe can. Maybe... your can.
- smacktoward 10y agoThe fascinating thing about old advertisements to me is how much faith they placed in the power of words to sell products. Old ads are absolutely swimming in copy. Words upon words upon words; literal walls of text. And the farther back in time you go, the more words they piled on. This is in contrast to modern advertising, where it's understood that images are what sell products and the ad strives to communicate visually, through photography, illustrations or a striking logo. We're a long way from the heyday of cigarette advertising, but I bet a lot more people today can still tell you about the Marlboro Man than could tell you what Marlboro's slogan was back then. (The answer: "Come to where the flavor is.") My modern mind looks at those old ads and reacts viscerally in the negative, recoiling at the thought of all that reading. I wonder how much of that is something fundamental, something basic about the way the brain works that ad men in the old days didn't understand, and how much is something new -- something that makes modern people different from how people were back then. How much contemporary culture has trained us to discount the word and favor the image, and what that says about us and the world we have built.
- corysama 10y agoThey cover this transition in the documentary "The Century of the Self". I highly recommend it.
- throwawasiudy 10y agofascinating observation. I never noticed this until now...
- UweSchmidt 10y agoIt seems like back then people were less saturated with media and seemed to trust and accept what they were told a lot more than today. Just consider old public service announcements - we would balk at being told what to do and how to live our lives. So maybe those long advertisements worked - even if you didn't read all of it, the text was there, surely containing all kinds of proof and reason. Right now we are experiencing another massive loss of trust in the media in general, and we seem to trust advertised products only if they're presented by the people we already explicitly follow on social media - maybe future generations will wonder how a single image, unattached to our 'relationships' could ever have worked?
- underpantsgnome 10y agoReminds me of Dr. Bronner's soap, the way the rambling, hyphenated copy freely invents words and associates the product with feelings of peace and goodwill.
- eponeponepon 10y agoPuts me a little in mind of the little ad segments of Ubik.
- noonespecial 10y agoI was having the hardest time figuring out why Philip K. Dick sprang instantly to mind reading this. Thanks. Could not for the life of me remember where or why!
- gumernatorial 10y agoI wonder how this style of advertising would work in a modern SaaS product. It would be a rebellion against virtually every principle of modern ad copy while still being rooted in something that sold units. Might try it.
- eponeponepon 10y agoAsk the question the other way round: will modern ad copy seem as different as this to readers in a hundred years time?
- gumernatorial 10y agoIt undoubtedly will, if words are even a meaningful concept at all.
- bitwize 10y ago"Fire up your lappy-top computer-device and watch your World-Wide-Web-app' whiz along at tip-top-speed with Node.js! Yes, sir, when you hear the name of Node.js you are bound to think, 'that's just the spot for the app' I intend-to-build!' From one gentleman to another, your eyes will pop-out-o-head when you see how lightning-quick and easy-like-Sunday-morning it is to build smashing, dashing, never-clashing app's with the power of Node.js -- from Joyent, truly the first name in Web-development-joy! Why, chap, it's right in the name! Just between ourselves, when you start your text-editor-program and write your app' with the two-fisted-power of Node.js, you can rest easy that it will not grow bigger-than-a-breadbox, nor collapse in a hot mess-o-dependencies, thanks to our patented Micro-Service Architecture! Don't tarry, good sir! Hurry to the Inter-Net and down-load our precious Node.js to-day!"
- eponeponepon 10y agoWhoever wrote those was a stone cold genius. They are making me want a cigarette from across nearly a century. Ridiculous. I mean, I am a smoker, I was probably going to go for one soon enough anyway, I'm sure it's just coincidence, buuuuuut... damn.
- NTripleOne 10y agoNah mate I know what you're on about - I genuinely want to try some of this stuff now.
- eponeponepon 10y agoFor anyone in the habit of skipping/blocking/ignoring comments on articles, this one is worth a look: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359#comment-1526212 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30359#comment-152621...
- kujenga 10y agoThe prose in these ads feels like I'm reading a Trump interview.
- bitwize 10y agoThis is a riot. It's almost like a Homestar Runner parody of "old-timey" speech. I'm particularly fond of the recurring verbal brohug, "just between (or among) ourselves". Like you're being let in on a little secret from one of your chums from the bar.