Remember the Vernacular

Remember the Vernacular

Or sometimes the best laid plans ignore the actual geography. I at once cringed and laughed a few years ago when Malcom X College here in Chicago had the slogan "Capping Off the Millenium" on banners around their urban campus, somehow missing the double entendre in the street definition of cap.

On Saturday, it happened again. Marshall Field's ran an ad in honor of Martin Luther King Jr, which was filled with excruciating iconography. The worst of which read in big wood-cut Soviet-style lettering:

Celebrate
THE MAN
(and then smaller text which cleared up that the man was Martin Luther King Jr)

I know the phrase is somewhat common, but the ad's large and equal emphasis on THE MAN seems to allude more to Urban Dictionary's definition than to the traditional honorary phrase, especially when coupled with a typeface reminiscent of a cruel and faceless regime.

Perhaps it's unfair of me, but in both these cases I'm puzzled as to how such copy/design escapes the various levels of the editorial process... Someone somewhere along the line must recognize that the wording or design emphasis could be changed to avoid embarassing puns in the vernacular of the target audience. Do they knowingly reject such interpretation, or is it just a mistake of circumstance? I have a hard time fully believing either.