It Will Also Kill Your Grammar


BD_bottle.jpgI was standing in Porter Square station Friday (for like 30 minutes) waiting for a train, when I saw one of those Live Outside the Bottle ads. While the last batch of subway ads that this altruistic pharma-consortium ran warned that willpower alone can’t help overcome alcoholism (take that AA!), this one went further, delineating just how much damage booze can do: physiological, familial, and … grammatical. Here’s the text:

If you or someone you love is an alcoholic and you’re not taking action to stop the problem, then you’re killing your marriage, your relationship with your kids, your career, and eventually alcohol will kill you.

(The message comes with the all-caps, unintentionally-Lebowski-referencing headline, “YOU ARE KILLING YOUR FAMILY.”)

So, if this tortured sot logic is intentional, I’m led to believe that if someone I love is an alky, and I’m not loading his stinking wino ass into a shopping cart and wheeling him to a doctor to obtain prescriptions for either Cephalon or Alkermes, then my career—nay, my very life—is in danger? Does the danger change by degree of love? In other words, am I as imperiled by a drunk uncle as I am by a drunk spouse? Where stops the tendrils? Just how terrified should I be?

And if that’s not the intended message, Big Pharma, is it really too much to ask to lay down a couple of C notes for a decent copy editor? Just trying to parse this ad made me want to go drink a pint of Black and screw up my cousin’s career.