Monday, November 3, 2008

Are “Change We Need”,“County First”or "Discovery Your Way" not grammatically correct?

The slogans ("Change We Need" or "County First") used by Barack Obama and John McCain who are running for the presidency of the United States seem incorrect grammatically. This reminded me of a discussion within our company about whether the company slogan was correct or not in grammar. Our company slogan is "Discovery Your Way!" which seems incorrect grammatically either. But thanks to Gavin who concluded: "Slogans do not need to have the same grammar as sentences". So, “Change We Need”,“County First”or "Discovery Your Way" are gramamatically correct as slogans.

Victor

Below is the what one of our colleagues wrote:
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Subject: China Highlights, Discovery Your Way! IS a grammatically correct SLOGAN (not a sentence)

Dear colleagues

I hear that our company slogan has had some criticism for being grammatically incorrect. You can tell people who criticize what should be common knowledge and obvious by now. Slogans do not need to have the same grammar as sentences. They are based on noun groups and minor clauses and are designed to be simple, to the point, catchy and memorable. Of course, they do need to follow certain rules of grammar and be spelt correctly*! *Where mis-spelling is deliberate this may also be used in slogans.

You might be interested to know there's a lot on the web about grammar or lack of it in slogans (Google grammar and slogans). This is an essay on the subject ( click here for the article). It includes other famous ungrammatical slogans like "Carlsberg Probably the best beer in the world". Basically, there's no problem with "China Highlights, Discovery Your Way!"

The meaning of the slogan 1. "China Highlights, Discovery Your Way!" means China Highlights (the company of this name) specialize in facilitating 'discovery', that is finding out new and exciting things about China, whilst fostering expertise with flexibility that enables trips and tours to be tailor-made to fit the needs and interests of their customers, hence 'Your Way!' (the exclamation mark emphasizes the attractiveness of such a customer-geared combination).

2. Slogans are not and never have been subject to the strictest of grammatical rules, i.e. the creation of sentences, which is the highest grammatical form in a language. In fact slogans rarely are sentences. So, to say a slogan must be a sentence is to take something away from the essence
of a slogan. However, slogans are typically formed from noun groups and minor clauses, which must be formed with correct word order and compatibility, inflection and punctuation, according to grammatical rules and the intended meaning. For example, you hear in the market place: "Delicious oranges - pound, a pound", but you will never hear: "An pound: pound orange deliciously". "China Highlights, Discovery Your Way!" IS a grammatically correct SLOGAN, but "You way! discovering, the: china Highlights'" is obviously not. click here for a more thorough analysis.

I hope this will bring an end to the unfounded criticism.

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