Grammar

I've lost the group I should have posted this to - but perhaps it only applies in GB. Have you found that when people don't know whether to use WE or US they usually plump for US?
There's a new advert on TV for a fabric conditioner that is driving me nuts!
Once a teacher, always a teacher, I suppose.
oldstick.

Me too - I know exactly the one you mean! (I was only screaming at the TV about it last night.) It just might have escaped my notice (because I was reading at the time) if it had only done it once but it's actually repeated a number of times - possibly on the basis that people remember ads that annoy them.

Bleuch. I must have not seen this one, as I am so far un-nutsified.

Still, it's a close relative of the presennial I/me/myself issue, I suppose.

To be both tongue in cheek and more than a little cynical, perhaps someone in ad-land has conducted a lexical analysis of current commercial usage and deemed that henceforth the correct usage of 'we' is limited to the following circumstances:

(1) celebrity endorsement and voice-over
(2) corporate PR, corporate philanthropy or concern for the environment
(3) Offers and competitions
(4) employee or consumer recommendation

I haven't seen the ad in question.

>1 oldstick:
Do name and shame the offending fabric-conditioner firm!

Better still, email their PR department with your critique of their faux-pas, making sure that prominently displayed is the fact that you have copied to the Plain English campaign group, The Guardian, the Oxford English Dictionary, Lynne Truss and any old dogsbody, and make their ridiculous copy a cause-celebre!

#5 Comfort

Wormed into my mind somewhere is "Softness is a thing called Comfort" - I didn't think much of that one either, grammatically speaking.

"Love is a Many-Splendored Thing"..... warble.... warble

"Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet".
Oh no it wasn't.