Saturday, December 27, 2008

Phonetic Reversal Diabetes Ad

The Utah Department of Health created a commercial using a technique called Phonetic Reversal. They recorded the guy, in English, repeating his line but completely in reverse. When you play it backwards, you can then understand what he is saying.

Here are the two videos:
Original Raw Footage (Phonetically Reversed)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ3bGeJoh5A

Reversed (Understandable)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C86QmRVk_7k

This first time I saw this on TV, I was in complete awe and totally amazed while most people seemed to not even have realized what was going on.

Desert VS Dessert

Here's the situation. You type up an invitation to your guests and get them printed. As you are stuffing the envelopes you notice it says: "Desert will be served around 8:30pm." Sorry, spell check didn't catch the error because desert was spelled correctly.

Other times, you just can't quite remember if it has one or two s's. How do you remember which is which?

Desert:
If you were stranded in a hot, dry desert, would you rather spend several or fewer days? If you're normal, you would have answered fewer. So remember that desert has fewer s's.

Dessert:
When it comes time for dessert, say ice cream, would you rather have one or two scoops? Most people would answer two. So for dessert, you will use two (more) s's.

Recap:
Eat MORE Dessert
LESS time in the Desert