In the aftermath of my recent post on how to thaw a jacket, Michael Andresen sent me his own candidate for the mysterious commercial output of the month. He's a satisfied customer at his local JungaJuice outlet but he also looks carefully at the menu. The JambaJuice menu he sent me is headed by an offering called Coldbuster®:
Now it's unclear why JambaJuice would want to add a dollop of powerful germs to an otherwise nourishing drink. And of course they wouldn't. The problem is that the menu writers somehow got topedoed by their mistaken notion about the function and use of a hyphen. They probably wanted to relate the parts of the compound word to each other, the way we distinguish "new-car salesman" from "new car-saleman." And they did this pretty well in the rest of the menu:
as adjective modifiers such as creamsicle-like mix, protein-packed delight, protein-rich mix, apple-strawberry juice, passionfruit-mango juice, all-natural orange juice, nutrient-rich orange juice, and as proper nouns such as Orange-A-Peel and Mango-A-Go-Go.
The only problem is with those nasty little "knock-out germs" that they seem to have added to the Coldbuster®.
Posted by Roger Shuy at January 24, 2007 12:59 PM