Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Now appearing on many sites, this vintage (1936) promotional ad for the Willesden Electricity Dept. (in northwest London):

The (presumably) intended reading is that it is anaphoric to work; ‘let electricity do the work’. But do it is a VP anaphor as a whole, so that the reading ‘let electricity kill your wife’ is only too easy to get.

The caption identifies the source as the Milne Museum — the Milne Electrical Collection at the Amberley Museum in West Sussex.

This entry was posted on January 23, 2015 at 6:43 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Language in advertising. 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.