Wednesday, November 25, 2009

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

There is an ad running around here from a car dealer named suntrap Kia. In the ad, a person is asking questions to a car dealer and the dealer is only responding with turkey gobble noises. The ad then says basically that if you are tired of other dealers talking turkey to you, you should come to Suntrup Kia. The inference here being that Suntrup does not talk turkey to its customers. The ad is cutely seasonal in that it is presently around Thanksgiving.

Now, maybe I’m just a bit odd because I actually think about what an ad actually says, but I can’t help but note that to “talk turkey” means to talk honestly. That’s what I remember and that’s what thesaurus.com says. In fact, thesaurus.com (http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/talk+turkey) adds that to “talk turkey” is a synonym for “get down to brass tacks, make no bones about it, mince no words.” I would think that I would WANT a car dealer to talk turkey to me, especially when the antonyms are “devious,” “dishonest,” “indirect,” and “wily.”

This also means that what the cute little seasonal Suntrap ad is saying is that if you are tired of other dealers talking honestly and directly to you, you should come to Suntrup. The inference is then that at Suntrup, they don’t talk honestly or directly when trying to sell you a car. That is about the stupidest thing a car dealer could advertise; that they are dishonest. And if they aren’t dishonest, then they are just idiots for running an ad where they don't know what they are saying. Either way, would YOU buy a car from these guys?

Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving!