How advertisers trick your brain by turning adjectives into nouns

Heinz, Nutella — (Image credit: (Facebook.com/NutellaUSA, Facebook.com/HeinzKetchup))

In marketing, it's become quite popular to use an adjective as a noun. Take a look at some examples collected by branding expert Nancy Friedman:

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Now, using adjectives as nouns is nothing new. For instance, we've long said "the poor" when we really mean "the poor people." But when we "spread the happy," we aren't spreading happy people, but happiness. Some adjectives have come to be nouns in their own right, not short forms for nouns they describe. Evil is one. Jolly, as in "get your jollies," is a more recent conversion. And some of them even name actual physical substances — fat is a good example of this, an adjective that got borrowed to nounhood a millennium ago and has been spreading ever since. But the above trend is different.

When a word of one type is taken unchanged for use as another type — most commonly when we verb something — the linguistic term is zero derivation, also known as conversion. But these marketing usages are not aiming simply to noun an adjective for convenience. They aim, as so much marketing does, to produce a striking effect. The word for what they're doing — forcing a word into an unexpected grammatical slot for effect — is anthimeria (also spelled antimeria), as has been pointed out in articles over the past decade by Nancy Friedman, Ben Yagoda, Robert Lane Greene, and others.

What is bisociation? It's an idea given a name by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation: You have two things operating on two different planes or according to two different scripts, and at the point where the two meet, you jump from one to the other. According to Koestler, it's central to creativity. Puns are a classic case of bisociation: The humor comes from jumping from one meaning to the other. Metaphors bisociate between two things on the basis of resemblance and often give striking insights and images — think of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "My candle burns at both ends." Syllepsis is another good sort: "At the entrance, I checked my coat, my privilege, and my watch." Bisociation tickles your brain, and that's just what marketers want to do.

Consider some other examples of anthimeria using slightly different types of words in the noun slot: Crystal's slogans "Full of Wow" and "Full of Yum," and the popular use of fail as a noun, as in "an epic fail" or "buckets of fail." In these cases, wow, yum, and fail can be seen as one-word expressions — the first two exclamations, the third something written (or stamped) on a document — used in noun slots. A similar structure is used in "Because X."

One thing we can say with some certainty is that the qualities named by the adjectives are being transmuted into magical things. Neal Whitman has observed that we can talk about "buckets of fail" and "bags of win" — we imagine fail and win as bulk items that can be carried around, which has a bisociative effect like a metaphor. Let's have a look again at what sort of thing an anthimeric adjectnoun can present:

Of course, in many cases these characteristics are characteristics of the thing being advertised. In fact, when we look a second time, we see that it's not just the quality being turned into a thing; in many cases, it's the thing being turned into the physical realization of a quality. Bisociation is a two-way street, after all. Fiats can be unlocked just as your more can — so a Fiat is being magically transformed into more. Heinz ketchup and Nutella are comestible thick fluids just as happy is, so they become the physical essence of happy. Marketers sell the sizzle, not the steak; with these anthimeric adjectnouns, they're selling the steak as the physical realization of sizzling.

James Harbeck is a professional word taster and sentence sommelier (an editor trained in linguistics). He is the author of the blog Sesquiotica and the book Songs of Love and Grammar.