Lost In Translation

"A person enters a wax museum and sees themselves. They're so startled that they fall over, knocking themselves down in the process."
Can you imagine this situation? The way we use words to describe different situations paints a picture that can sometimes be rather confusing. However, there are clues in the structure of language to help us untangle the mystery. Some of these clues come from the way we order words, other clues come from our world-knowledge and the context of the sentence. Since everyone has different experiences, our understanding can vary dramatically.

Persuasion of consumers is big business and is largely based on psychology. Joan will talk about the techniques advertisers use to do this - how people, especially children are persuaded, and how this feeds into our shopping habits. If you can remember an advert then you’ve learned it. Adverts use: product placement, colour, typeface, jingles, taglines etc - all these create strong links to encourage you to choose one product over another. Joan will also consider if we are now bombarded with too many advertising messages and whether this is making them less effective.