GrammarBlog

Monday, 22 October 2007

Quandary: New, Improved Recipe

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I was party to an interesting conversation the other day. Actually it wasn't that interesting as I recall but, since I'm about to blog about it, I'm going pretend it was. To be fair the conversation did raise an interesting question. I shall paint you a picture:

Imagine, if you will, that I am a purveyor of tasty snacks. Tasty as they are, I decide to improve the recipe with which my snacks are created. When I sit down to design the packaging I decide to put the phrase "NEW, IMPROVED RECIPE!" all over it.

Aside from the glaring error of using capitalised type, I find myself with another quandary: can my recipe be both new and improved at the same time?

I've seen this quite a lot on packaging; I suspect we all have. On the one hand I can see that the recipe is a new recipe, it improves on the old, thus it is a "new, improved recipe". Equally if the recipe is new it replaces the old recipe and therefore isn't improving anything, except perhaps sales figures for my ludicrously tasty snack.

Help me, if you can, to quell my quandary.

Labels: quandary

posted by Paul at 3:38 pm 8 Comments

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