Threat Quality Press

Whoah, the news!  Here is a post from Jezebel about how PETA has begun a campaign to rebrand “fish” as “sea kittens,” so that they will miraculously become too cute for anyone to eat.

They’ve got a whole campaign and everything!

I know what you’re thinking.  It’s this:  “Hey, you know, that’s not a bad idea.  People don’t think of fish as being cuddly.  Maybe if they do, people won’t eat them!”

It is a bad idea, and I will explain why.  Remember back, a million years ago, when I wrote about how advertising was “The Industry of Magical Thinking“?  And how you can use associative labels to apply characteristics from one thing to another, as though performing a kind of voodoo?

The way it works is that you “charge up” a label by using it in conjunction with a thing that people understand and know about, and then you apply it to a thing that people don’t understand and know about, and the characteristics of the “charged” label fill in or supplant the stuff that we know about the new thing.

So, you can charge up the label “kitten,” and then apply it to fish, right?  Well, no.  Because we fucking know what fish look like.  They are scaly, and have huge staring eyes, and some of them have poisonous god-damn spines on them.  The reason that “fish” is not a word that is associated with cute cuddliness, and that hearing it doesn’t make literally* every person in the world speak in idiotic half-sentence baby talk is not because the word itself is inherently uncuddly–it’s because FISH are inherently uncuddly.

It’s like this:  you can rebrand a “tax surplus” as a “budget surplus,” because generally speaking, while people know what “tax” and “budget” and “surplus” are (they are all “charged” labels), no one really knows what the fuck a “tax surplus” is.  We don’t know where the money came from, or how the government manages its money, or whatever.  Switching the labels does not directly contradict the evidence of a lifetime of experience.

Trying to call a FISH a KITTEN does contradict every observable aspect of both fish AND kittens.  The same way you couldn’t make people be less afraid of “house fires” by calling them “happy fun slides.”  THEY ARE STILL FIRES.  So, one of two things will happen:  either the label will just switch meanings (i.e., “happy fun slide” just becomes a term that you dread hearing about on the news), or the label won’t stick, and everyone will think you’re some brain-damaged kid from the woods speaking your own crazy made-up Nell language.

*Literally

This entry was posted on January 9, 2009 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Braak with tags Braak, crotchety ranting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.