Tag: Automobiles

A Dose of Gobbledygook

 

“Gobbledygook” has three syllables, making it a suitable candidate for the brand name for a drug since they often have names that length, names such as Cosentyx and Myrbetriq. “Gobbledygook” doesn’t have any rarely used consonants, however, consonants such as “x” and “q” and “z”. Marketers also like to end their invented words for products with a vowel such as “a” or “o”, a practice they have followed with automobiles as well as drugs, as in Elantra, Levitra, and Toronado and Lexapro. Are they cars? Are they drugs? Manufacturers and their marketers spend millions of dollars to persuade prospective customers to feel good about their products and to feel they are unique, but it all ends up muddled together as gobbledygook.

Inspector George Larrick and the "American Chamber of Horrors" Exhibit (FDA 110) (8228181026)
George Larrick was the last investigator to rise through the ranks to become Commissioner (1954-1965) of the Food and Drug Administration. Inspector Larrick assembled an exhibit of dubious and even dangerous food and drug products, dubbed by reporters an “American Chamber of Horrors”, which effectively documented the need for what became the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Photo from the Food and Drug Administration.

 

The pharmaceutical companies are under much greater restraints in product naming than the automobile manufacturers, who apparently invent their names merely from the results of market research and internal spitballing. All those names ending in vowels, a fairly rare occurrence in English, but more common in the Romance languages such as Spanish, may be intended by automobile marketers to make buyers feel they are getting something faintly exotic. Drug makers have to submit brand names of new products to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has rules to ensure drug names are sufficiently distinct from one another to minimize the risk of confusion which, in the case of drugs, could lead to serious complications or death for patients if doctors or pharmacists mistakenly substitute prescriptions. There is no comparable risk involved in driving an Elantra instead of a Celica.

Using a drug’s scientific name is not an option the drug companies seriously consider because those names are often more polysyllabic and unpronounceable than the silly brand names they ultimately invent. In a very few instances, a shortened form of the scientific name becomes generally recognizable, as in ibuprofen or acetaminophen, but those can’t be trademarked. Therefore we have the option of buying Advil or generic ibuprofen, Tylenol or generic acetaminophen. It’s no accident, by the way, that both of those brand names are simpler and easier to pronounce than more recent drug brand names, since both of them were developed over thirty years ago, when competition in the pharmaceutical market hadn’t heated up to today’s incandescent level.

What has changed since then has been the increasing average age of the population and the consequent increase in demand for medicines to treat their growing health complaints. Drug manufacturers are also not above boosting demand with lengthy and frequently repeated television commercials urging prospective users to pressure their doctors into prescribing the advertised medicine. They cover the other end as well by sponsoring junkets and giveaways for doctors, nudging them toward prescribing the latest drug they have developed.

A most excellent reading by Irene Worth and John Gielgud in 1983 of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The entire book is presented in this video, but the part that concerns us here is the first poem, “The Naming of Cats”, which proceeds up to the 1:45 mark.

It’s a high stakes game for pharmaceutical companies that have spent millions of dollars on research and development for a drug, and then millions more on shepherding it through FDA approval, and finally marketing it. Notice how television drug ads are 60 seconds long instead of the usual 30 seconds, and how often they are repeated, particularly during the day when their target audience of older people are presumably at home watching. There’s gold in them thar hills of retirement, and pharmaceutical companies mean to get their share. Whether the residents of the golden hills are better off with the latest heavily advertised gobbledygook drug or something else, or with nothing at all, is up to them and not to marketers, no matter how warm and fuzzy the television ads portray their lives can be, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, an old song the human targets of drug ads might still remember well.
— Ed.

 

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The Pause That Refreshes

 

Editor’s note: There was no post on this website last Friday, April 27, because it is healthy to take a break and go fishing once in a while.

 

“The pause that refreshes” was a slogan coined in 1929 by Coca-Cola marketers, and nearly a century later it remains one of the most memorable advertising slogans for Coke, or for any other product. It was also in the 1920s that Henry Ford instituted a new policy at his automobile manufacturing plant to shorten workers’ shifts to eight hours and their work week to 40 hours, a model that soon became the standard throughout American industry. In 1938, the federal government established with the Fair Labor Standards Act a minimum wage and rules for most workers to receive time and a half payment for hours worked over 40 in a week.


Niels Frederik Schiøttz-Jensen An afternoon's rest
An Afternoon’s Rest, an 1885 painting by Niels Frederik Schiøttz-Jensen (1855-1941).

It’s still up to the states to regulate breaks and lunch time off for workers, and many do so in a minimal way, if at all. It may come as a surprise to some workers that their breaks often come solely at the discretion of their employer or, if they are with a union, because breaks are written into the contract between the union and management. Even bathroom breaks can be a source of contention between labor and management. It is a wonder then to consider how much conditions for workers have generally improved since the early years of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when 12 and 16 hour days were not uncommon and workers’ welfare and safety were entirely their own lookout.

What changed things was when workers started to organize and bargain collectively in the late nineteenth century. It is a misconception to think the worker holiday of May Day started in communist countries, because it actually began in the United States, and has come to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago, Illinois, in May of 1886 when workers on strike and demonstrating for an eight hour workday ended up in deadly confrontations with the police over the course of two days. Unionization continued wringing concessions from management through the first half of the twentieth century, and from 1945 to 1975 the percentage of the non-farm workforce belonging to a union peaked at over 30 percent. In the years since, union membership has declined to less than half that, and the remaining unions, many of them organizations formed for the benefit of state employees such as teachers, are under attack from Republican controlled state governments.

A discussion of ways of coping in life from the 1964 film of The Night of the Iguana, based on the play by Tennessee Williams, directed by John Huston, and starring Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Richard Burton as the defrocked Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon.

None of that changes the need of people concentrating on their work to take a break from it every once in a while throughout the day, and for weeks or more at a time throughout the year. Robots have no need of breaks, but for the time being there are still jobs robots cannot do and those jobs will require the talents of fallible, sometimes frail humans. Enlightened management can choose to view breaks for workers as beneficial to both parties, since a more rested worker can be more productive in the long run than one who is run ragged. Less enlightened management may consider the burnout of workers as the cost of doing business, believing they are easily replaceable cogs in management’s profit making machine. That mindset prevailed over a hundred years ago, before Henry Ford, who was by no means enlightened in all areas, nonetheless saw that his workers and people like them were the buyers of his automobiles, and raised their wages and improved their conditions in the interest of maintaining a kind of partnership with them, rather than treating them wholly as chattel, as cogs in the gears of production.
— Vita

 

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Zippity Doo Dah

 

In a perfect world where people are always well-behaved and courteous and the bluebird of happiness accompanies them throughout their day, the zipper merge would work as harmoniously as traffic engineers envision it working. In practice, the zipper merge rarely works well, and instead it becomes a place where jerks can take advantage of the polite behavior of others in order to cut in line. Everyone who drives is familiar with the traffic setup, but not everyone may be acquainted with the term “zipper merge”.

 

A zipper merge refers to the area of road where one or more lanes end, and all traffic must move into the remaining open lane or lanes, such as in a construction zone. A similar situation presents itself where one lane of a road becomes an exit, with warning signs posted that the lane is for exiting only. Traffic engineers refer to these areas as zipper merges because ideally that is how they want drivers to conduct themselves where a lane closes down or where an exit lane is about to leave the main roadway. Like a closing zipper, cars in adjacent lanes should politely alternate merging together into the one open lane, making use of the closing lane as much as possible.

Construction Barrels (14173532670)
Every driver recognizes these orange barrels as the lane markers in road construction zones, but not every driver reacts to them the same way, much as traffic engineers would like them to.

It’s a neat theory, and when it works as proposed it is a fine thing. “After you, sir.” “No, I insist, madam, you go first.” “Ah, very well, I shall do so then, and a fine day to you, sir.” “My pleasure, madam.” And a tip of the hat to you, too. Usually, however, most drivers who see the warning signs about a lane closure will move over to the through lane early, queuing up. The zipper merge happens in a sense, but farther back from the closure than engineers envisioned it. This polite behavior by most drivers is admirable because it invokes the manners ingrained in many people from early in life, but it has the effect of leaving a stretch of open road in the closing lane, and that is a temptation for jerks.

Not all drivers who take advantage of the open lane are jerks in their own eyes, because it is as hard for a jerk to recognize his own jerky behavior as it is for a fish to understand it is swimming in water. There are many rationalizations available to jerks, after all, the most prominent one provided by the traffic engineers who designed this scenario. The jerk reasons as he zips past everyone waiting patiently in line and then cuts in at the front “We’re supposed to use all of the closing lane up until the very end, but the idiot sheep lined up over there don’t understand that!” he would be more hesitant to try the same maneuver in a long store checkout line, but here in this situation traffic engineers have by default endorsed predatory driving, and therefore the jerk sees it as okay.

The exit lane situation is designed into the roadway, rather than being an ad hoc situation due to construction, but it promotes the same kind of selfish behavior. A multiple lane road in town loses one lane to an exit, and at times when the traffic is heavy there may be a long line of slowly moving cars in the lane which will eventually veer off the main road. The opportunistic jerk assesses the situation and, instead of dropping into line at the back, where cars are moving slowly and obviously intend to exit, continues at speed in the lane adjacent to the exit lane until he sees his opening near the front, shortly before the exit lane leaves the road, and swoops in, as often as not using his turn signal, as if that made his shark move alright. “Hey, I’m signaling! Let me in!”

There’s not much that can safely be done about zipper merge jerk behavior other than rage against it or hope that traffic engineers get their heads out of the clouds and figure out a better way to design merge zones, one that takes into account actual human behavior in the real world. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the auto mechanic brothers who conducted the Car Talk call-in radio program on NPR until 2012, when elder brother Tom’s failing health forced them to discontinue the show, had a caller on one show that they reran in 2015 who had a question for them about using the open lane in a zipper merge. The show was Episode 1538: “Aberrant Behavior Syndrome”, and the caller was Brian, from Kentucky, who called in at about the 11:30 mark of the show. Brian wasn’t absolutely a jerk, even if he did rationalize using the open portion of a closing lane at the expense of his fellow drivers, but Tom and Ray – especially Tom – set him straight in a most definitive and entertaining manner, and their reasoning goes beyond the misconceptions of traffic engineers and the pushiness of jerks who look out only for themselves.
— Ed.

 

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There but for the Grace of God

 


Roadside memorials for traffic accident fatalities have been appearing more frequently over the past 20 years, a period when the numbers of deaths per capita or per mile driven had been dropping until the last two years, when they have risen again. Since the increase in memorials has not been tied to overall traffic fatalities, there must be another reason. Unfortunately, no one seems to have a reason other than the increase in memorials being due to a snowballing cultural phenomenon. People become aware of the memorials, and then when a loved one dies in an automobile wreck, they feel moved to erect a memorial near that spot, and so the phenomenon builds on itself, this being its moment.

 


One force that could be feeding the movement is the amount of young people who are dying in traffic accidents, many of them on account of their own negligence due to distracted driving. Young people have always been overrepresented in the traffic fatality statistics due to their willingness to take foolish risks, but now add in their addiction to cell phones and they have become an even more dangerous element on the roads. Insurance companies, who put dollars and cents numbers on risky behavior, understand this and accordingly attach high premiums to policies for drivers under 30 years old. Having a relative taken away by death in a violent accident at a very young age is of course a more traumatic event than having one taken away by natural causes at an advanced age, and may be a factor in the urge of friends and relatives to build a roadside memorial.


Angel teddy bear memorial
Statuettes at a roadside memorial in 2006.


None of this is by way of claiming that most roadside memorials are erected by traumatized relatives on behalf of teenaged drivers and drivers in their twenties who were irresponsibly texting when they ran their car off the road and flipped it over in a ditch. There are scant statistics available to support such a claim, though a deep dive into state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) websites may turn up a breakdown of accident causes or contributing factors. Mainly it is speculation to suppose distracted driving may have been a primary cause of any accident marked by a roadside memorial. While texting is a phenomenon of the past 20 years, and as such coincides with the increase in roadside memorials, there is nevertheless a logical fallacy described in Latin as “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”, meaning “after this, therefore because of this”. Still, the coincidence bears consideration.

As a matter of personal experience, however, anyone who has been driving the past 20 years cannot help noticing the increase in distracted driving around them. Sitting at a red light behind a driver who is mesmerized by his or her phone means waiting extra seconds before accelerating after the light turns green, or even having to honk the horn to rouse that driver from smartphone induced hypnosis. Driving on a road behind or next to a texting driver means being alert to his or her sudden and unexpected accelerations and decelerations of their vehicle and jerking it from side to side, behavior that is exactly the same as a drunk driver. Getting out in front of a texting driver is not entirely safe either, as is obvious by glancing in the rear view mirror at the texting driver looking down toward his or her lap rather than up toward the road and the back of the car, your car, that they are dangerously closing in on.

A 2012 experiment in Belgium to demonstrate the dangerous foolishness of people who believe they can drive competently while texting. For additional views on the casualties of texting and driving, see the 2013 Werner Herzog documentary From One Second to the Next.
As they drive past a roadside memorial bedecked in flowers and balloon hearts and teddy bears, motorists reflecting on its meaning have no idea whether the memorial is for an irresponsible driver or the innocent victim of that driver, any more than a person walking through a cemetery knows the particulars behind the deaths of the people marked by the tombstones over their graves. If the driver thinks for a few seconds about how quickly life can be snuffed out, whether by foolishness or merely by bad luck, and checks their vehicle speedometer and puts their phone away in the glove compartment, then maybe the roadside memorial has served a good purpose after all. Taking it easy and laying off the accelerator and the constant jonesing to communicate, even though it be about nothing of note, maybe the driver reflects upon seeing the roadside memorial and thinks “There but for the grace of God go I”, and gets home safely.
— Ed.

 

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