The Brooding Banter of Banality

I have a problem, you see. Stupid people bother me. They just make me angry. I mean, education is free. Alright, I'll stop rhyming now. It is even getting irratating on this end. Stupidity is particularly irksome when it is in a very public forum, such as the radio. I am not talking about the idiocy of the hosts, though it is certainly there.

No, this particular brand of idiocy is in a commercial. A commercial for the X-cup. This is not some sort of cup that has decided to no longer be a cup, but instead has decided to embrace its bowl-like qualities. Nor is it the description of an unprotected football player. It is some sort of competition for extreme sports (more on that before). Anyways, I have heard this advertisement several times over the past week and everytime I have heard it I have remarked how stupid it is.

This is because one of the sentences is "where gravity defies all odds." Now, I have tried to rack my brain to come up with what they are trying to say here. My first assumption was that Gravity is ridiculously good at games of chance. Gravity goes to the roulette table and wins on double zero four times in a row. Or Gravity heads down to the dog track and puts all his money on Bngo, the dog who lost an eye (close relative of one Li'l Brudder) and takes home a banker's roll. Perhaps Gravity has been hit by a meteor and won the lottery at the exact same time. It could even be possible that "odds" is the teenage slang for adults or parents and Gravity has hit his rebellious years.

Enough speculation, I suppose. At first it seemed to me to be a mixed-metaphor, which annoy me thoroughly. I think, however, that it is a combination of the mixed-metaphor (the phrases "defy all odds" and "defy gravity") with just generally poor grammar, which, provided it isn't atrocious, is generally not all that bothersome to me. In this case, as you might guess, it is bothersome. I mean, you can't just rearrange the words of a phrase and assume it means the same thing you intend. Gravity is the object, not the subject. I feel like a grammar nerd for pointing this out. Well, I guess I am to some degree, though my grammar is certainly not perfect. I mean, I did recently purchase not one, but two grammar books for entertainment purposes. On a side note, just one of these would have taught me far more than I learned from an expository writing class where good writing gets a mere 70% and poor writing gets a ridiculous 70%. And if we are talking about Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies, they were equally entertaining (that said, in both cases it was not the grammar that was entertaining but that which surrounded the grammar).

Remember, don't be stupid. Because stupid people are stupid. And you don't want to be one of them, do you?