Bad grammar or good advertising?
A couple of days ago, I came across a confusing paper napkin. The confusing bit was the slogan printed on the napkin:
The phrase for ecological thinking people is either grammatically incorrect (it should read for ecologically thinking people), or missing a comma after ecological (leaving out the comma is very confusing, and most people are of the thinking kind). Since I had previously encountered cases of advertising with incorrect grammar, I was curious to find out who made the napkin. While I was not very surprised to learn that the company is based in a German-speaking country (the mistake of writing ecological instead of ecologically is quite common for German native speakers since the German equivalent would be ökologisch). However, I was quite surprised about the fact that the slogan has been trademarked, including the faulty grammar. The interesting question is: did the company spend money to trademark a grammatically incorrect slogan and print it on millions of napkins by mistake or on purpose? The napkin certainly caught my eye…