Wordwatch: Excited
The other morning my computer, unbidden, flashed me this message: “Thanks for using Adobe Flash Player. We’re proud that Flash had a key role in evolving web content across animation, interactivity, audio, and video — and we’re excited to help lead the next era of digital experiences” – online advertisement, November 2021.
This reminded me of a classic New Yorker cartoon that shows two cats behind an upholstered armchair in the tall back of which are long gaping scratch-marks. One cat is saying to the other: “I’ve got one or two other projects that I’m excited about.”
This beautifully nails the silly fashionable – though not very recent – use of the word “excited” in advertising and promotional literature to instil in the reader a sense of being caught up in a thrilling event or development that, we are made to feel, is irresistibly life-enhancing or important.
It is of course important for the advertisers, who are understandably anxious to convey their own excitement as a vehicle for their wish to persuade us to spend money on their product. As with all advertising, this is dangerous.
It’s dangerous because, although it seeks to involve us in what is apparently a friendly human relationship, its primary purpose is persuasion: it wants to persuade us to adopt a cause, or part us from our cash.
In the context of advertising, no individual word or phrase can be trusted to mean what it appears to mean. I’ve picked out “excited”, but what about the word that immediately precedes it – “We’re”?
Further up we had the introductory “We’re proud”. Who does this “we” refer to? Who are these people who are so proud and excited?
The word “we” implies an introduction to a group of people we (want to) know and trust, an avuncular body who have our best interests at heart.
But in this case they go by the name of “Adobe Flash Player” which, we must assume, stands not so much for well-intentioned friends as for a business organisation, a corporation or at any rate a team of individuals who are all working (in what capacity?) on a project/ artefact/ system that “had a key role in evolving web content across animation, interactivity, audio and video.” Whoever they are, they’ve lost me.
And why should I need to know? They want me to believe that what they’re doing is something they’re proud of. They explain: they’re “excited to help lead the next era of digital experiences”- whatever that means. Incidentally, I’m amused by their grand use of the word “era.”
We’re into broad historical overviews here: we stand on the brink of a new age (“era” implies a long time), and that new era contains what? “digital experiences”. Isn’t that a bit of a let-down? Aren’t a great many of our transactions nowadays “digital experiences”?
I speak as a complete layman, but isn’t digitalisation what makes the world go round nowadays? It’s the essential mechanism of everything, from how smartphones are constructed to the algorithms plotting the details of our viewing and telephoning habits or the processing of our bills at the supermarket checkout.
The Adobe Flash Player is no doubt already fully digitalised, and the people who advertise it, and are so excited about it, should, I feel, just get their heads down and press on with their very important jobs, content (if not excited) to be working for the general good. But I somehow can’t imagine that that is quite the way they see it.