7/30/2010
John "underpaid civil servant" F. says:
In a book that goes back almost 40 years called "Class", the author (I think his name was Fuzzell or Frizell or something like that) talks about how buzzwards are used to market to various levels in society. If I remember correctly, they were as follows:
lower class: "free"
lower middle class: "easy" (as in EZ credit)
middle class: "luxury"
upper middle class: "right" or "proper"
upper class: "secure" and "liquid"
Some of this still applies today. Spam offers stuff for free and I assume the only people who fall for it, other than elderly folks on the verge of dementia, are very uneducated and low class people. Easy is not so common but the implication is still there, like the "XXX for dummies" books. Luxury is still popular, and still tacky - anyone who buys something marked "luxury" because of the word, typically when applied to real estate, is social climbing and is buying into an area that is "trendy" or "gentrified" rather than a really classy one. Right and proper are not quite so common, but one still here advertising talking about "wealth preservation" (obviously aimed at the old-money or new-money people who can pull off looking like old-money) which is close to using "secure."
This dude wrote in the United States of the 1970's, so of course not all of this applies as much in Canada, which does not have quite the same amount of wealth disparity that the US does.
And I notice Canadians are not quite as bad as people in Chicago about applying ridiculous appellations to real estate developments, including overuse of the words "regency", "Brittany", "Normandy" (or "Normandie"), "Tuscany", "Devon" (or "Devonshire"). I may have posted this before but the ultimate in idiocy was a townhouse complex in Chicago built in the 1980's that someone name "Tamerlane", evidently unaware that the historical Tamerlane was a really nasty guy who put his near contemporary Vlad Dracul to shame.
I never really got the "Devon" thing. I know it's supposed to be pretty but the Lake District is supposed to be too, and I never hear of anything named "Cumbria." Nor for that matter, Aquitaine or Gascony (that one even has a "y'"). One occasionally hears "Picardy" or "Picardie" in the US though this is a rather stupid choice too as it is a particularly ugly part of France.
In general, Canadian real estate developers seem a bit more trendy about naming things.
