These darn things fascinate me:
Apr. 15th, 2011 11:26 amThese darn things fascinate me:

Obviously it's useful for advertisers to make their slogans etc as punchy as possible, for example doing away with awkward auxiliary verbs ("Grow your knowledge", suggests Oxford University Press) and curtailing adverbs ("Shop Smart").
Now, if you're a hardline grammarian all this may make your skin crawl. But I can't help feeling that, say, Apple's "Think Different" actually conveys a different shade of meaning to "think differently" - not just "think in a different way" but something more like "make difference your goal". In which case, "different" would be an adjective, not an uninflected adverb.
But what part of speech is the "fresh" in "eat fresh"? It's a brilliant slogan, two equally stressed syllables with similar vowels, which instantly convey what Subway is offering, ie, salad. Surely it can't be a Manx version of "eat freshly" - that doesn't make any sense. Is it a sort of abbreviation of "eat fresh food" or even a poetic "eat freshness"? Or perhaps an unpunctuated "Eat. Fresh." This is language that works; it's not wrong. But how does it work?

Obviously it's useful for advertisers to make their slogans etc as punchy as possible, for example doing away with awkward auxiliary verbs ("Grow your knowledge", suggests Oxford University Press) and curtailing adverbs ("Shop Smart").
Now, if you're a hardline grammarian all this may make your skin crawl. But I can't help feeling that, say, Apple's "Think Different" actually conveys a different shade of meaning to "think differently" - not just "think in a different way" but something more like "make difference your goal". In which case, "different" would be an adjective, not an uninflected adverb.
But what part of speech is the "fresh" in "eat fresh"? It's a brilliant slogan, two equally stressed syllables with similar vowels, which instantly convey what Subway is offering, ie, salad. Surely it can't be a Manx version of "eat freshly" - that doesn't make any sense. Is it a sort of abbreviation of "eat fresh food" or even a poetic "eat freshness"? Or perhaps an unpunctuated "Eat. Fresh." This is language that works; it's not wrong. But how does it work?