Saturday, March 18, 2006

The Beauty of Generics








With VASELINE, couples can feel at ease with their personal hygene and trust in a preparation of the choicest ingredients selected, combined, and certified by a commission of fully bonded chemists.

Just look at those two newlyweds nee lovelies. They don't even know they want to fuck. But that's always been the beauty of the VASELINE line of products. Never about fucking and always about elbows. Always about couples, never about the modern gentleman.

Enter a competitor of Vaseline, Kroger's generic 100% Pure Petroleum Jelly and skin protectant. This product doesn't fuck around, namely because it knows you do.

Behold the back label: "When using this product DO NOT GET INTO EYES."

The colloquialism is cute, isn't it? So, too, is the gerund. You don't "apply" the product. This is a product for USING baby. Yet one must inquire, Do not get WHAT into eyes? We may assume this dictate to be addressed to the modern gentleman, always on the run in his workaday life, and well-deserving of a break from the hub bub.

Now, get it out of your filthy noggin: it's not do not get THAT into eyes. Such common trajections are beyond referencing in polite society. What we have here is a more straightforward bit of product self-consciousness: do not GET INTO EYES is a gentle reminder for the "user" to refer to, to GET INTO, some other body part for this product to, well, come in handy.

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