adverts

We have an advertising standards agency who so call vet all adverts and make sure they comply with at least the truth.
Every day there is an advert for red bull which cannot be true so how do they get round the advert standards
There is an advert for a commemorative coin (Lord Nelson) which they are producing with a run of 3999 coins then say it equates to one per 7000 household but there are approx 27 million households in England
How many other adverts don't ring true or are close to a lie

clever wording is the key Peter, 100% British Beef in our hamburgers does not mean the burger is made 100% beef, The burger is mince meat with bread and the mince meat bit is 100% from British beef or, should be,
No Added sugar does not mean , It is sugar free, It means they put sugar in and dont add any extra...

If assuming there are28 million households then the ratio of coins to households would be aprox1 in 7000.
28 million / 3999 = 7001.75044

.According to 'Which', washing machines do NOT live longer with Calgon. Has not stopped Reckitt from continuing with the claim in their advert.

Following on from Tom's post, many products known as Hamburgers are, in fact, made of beef. Very rarely are we able to buy Hamburgers made from ham.

Also, products such as bleach boast "kills 99% of all known germs." Totally untrue.

Bleach can kill many types of germs and viruses. It's a very powerful cleaner

LINK

Well you would not expect to.

Hamburgers because Hamburg America Lines served good food when other transatlantic carriers could not.(Hamburg salt beef and onions was the secret)

Nowt do with ham!

Which is also why the name emerged in USA.

You can ignore the claims (which have only emerged in recent years) that various Hamburg people had invented them. The name only really became recognised within Germany during my lifetime.

What really annoys me is the deliberate misleading commonly found on Amazon, etc

The number of times I have returned a product described as leather, which upon delivery is clearly polyurethane. (So called PU leather)

OR, described as wood, but is plastic with a woodgrain finish.

Disk drives labelled new, they might look new, but self test log showing thousands of hours usage!

and so on.

A shop would probably get taken to court, but Amazon gets away with it.

"Hamburgers are, in fact, made of beef. Very rarely are we able to buy Hamburgers made from ham."
Hamburgers were named after the place where they were invented, not after the meat content.

GB, there are nowhere near 27 million households in England!

First Mate, I couldn't understand what he meant, because I quickly calculated it to roughly one per household. Okay, I could have been "a pedantic ******" and said that it doesn't calculate to exactly one per household, but...

Wasn't one Red Bull advert withdrawn due to some misleading information?

I have got relatives who are Hamburgers!

Well, at least I did have, once.

I don't think there are any of them still living.

I do recall in 1950's they found calling the foodstuff with the name a little odd. Beef patties have been around for millennia.

I once read, a long time ago, that the Hamburger was created in America by a German cook.

Nineteenth Century immigrants to USA tried to copy the outstanding food which they had enjoyed on Hamburg America line boats.

Is there dogs in hot dog sausages A few years ago we trailed all the way to Birmingham to look at what was advertised has leather three piece suites but had probably never seen a cow in their lifetime

I'm not going to Google, because we all can do that!
Honestly, I don't know why they are called "Hot Dogs", but I have the feeling that it has some connection which is not canine.
I can understand the connection regarding "Hamburger", because people from Hamburg are referred to as Hamburgers as people from Berlin are referred to as Berliners. Also, there is a type of doughnut known as a Berliner.

Peter, it must have been really annoying and, naturally, a waste of time and money if you had only made the journey for that suite.

There’s a Jewish family in Manchester with the surname Hamburger. The late Sir Sidney Hamburger was the leader of Manchester Jewry and the founder of Searchlight electrical.

gaffer, some names are strange. I am sure that most of us are quite thankful for having the name we have. I once worked with someone whose "real" surname was Satan. The person's first name was also unusual.

ianp at the time the smart motorway was under construction near Knutsford which added over two hours to our journey. We put a complaint into trading standards but never heard back from them so don't know if they followed it up

The only advert I rmember being banned was years ago,"Persil washes whiter", it didn't.

This could be checked, but weren't many adverts taken off air as they were no longer acceptable due to changes in our society. Therefore, adverts about smoking, drinking alcohol etc.

When Kennedy said " Ich bin ein Berliner " , his meaning literally was ' I am a doughnut .
What he should have said was 'Ich bin Berliner ' .

It is a recurring problem when non-native German speakers encounter unfamiliar terms. In German, there is no logical relationship to help you know the gender of nouns, you just have to know it, and if you get it wrong, you easily end up with the wrong meaning.

Tis a great boon that the English language has largely abandoned gender applicable to inanimate nouns. Still a few exceptions, like ships being she.

However, with respect to JFK, it is not strictly true

Then there is GB News

If you had to pay for it, you could certainly have them under the Trade Descriptions Acts

How many languages are logical?
Although, as you rightly stated, "The English language has largely abandoned...", there is so much to try and grasp when learning the language as a foreign language. So much that we take for granted.
For me, one of the peculiarities is, in spoken terms, a double vowel being shorter than the single vowel.
There is also our use of the word "the", which we naturally use correctly. Also, the preposition "to" and other prepositions.
Additionally, how we spell words and "pronounce" words. The "pronunciation" and spelling are different to the verb form.
For example, consider these words: advertise/advertisement, photograph/photographer, cup, board, cupboard, child/children, woman/women, rough, borough, reserve/reservation, hear/heard, bear/beard...
The list is long.

To quickly go back to the main topic, it is curious how some adverts have changed to be more acceptable.
For example, there are changes in the roles of yesteryear as we are now shown the business person to be female and the person taking care of the baby or cooking is male. Of course, these changes are realistic as our roles have changed in many ways.

Apologies, ianp, of course you are right. I had not wished to imply languages were logical. Perhaps I should have been more explicit. Inanimate Nouns: English has largely ceased to gender them, French does, but fairly logically. German however shows no respect to logic. 'Girl' is not feminine, but neuter. (Das Mädchen)

Some discussion of this here

The relationship between language and logic takes us very deep into the tangles of philosophy.

No need to apologise. My thought, while typing, was to offer the chance to readers to greatly consider the complexity and complications of our language.

By the way, I have heard that the younger generation in Germany doesn't focus as much on the language as the previous generations. Also, many now mix languages as American English has become a part of their language and many things coming out of America influences them.

Ena malcup,
I once saw this in one of the McDonald's:
"COFFEE TO GO UND MITNEHMEN"

I think an attraction of the English language has been our willingness to import terms and phrases from other languages. So our means of expression evolve fairly freely.
(even though it makes for a lot of inconsistency)

The French have an academy which promotes an official version of their language: something I would have thought to be counterproductive.

How would you say "je ne sais quoi" if you had to use English terms. I know, quite readily, but at greater length and with less elegance.

PS, sorry for tandem riding on this topic, but will willingly 'button-it', the instant someone picks up the original thread/topic.