Flutterby™! : Marketing copy

Among the varied topics on this morning's hike were the reaffirmation of the Janeane Garafolo / Roger Ebert expressed opinion that one should never see a movie whose trailer starts with "In a world where...", we then seguéd into the discussion about the question of audience for such trailers which tied in nicely to the recent Peterme comments about KnowNow:

...one also has to wonder who on fucking earth thinks such marketing copy is worthwhile?

and it occurred to me... As I've worked with people from Catherine to Alec on editing and improving writing, one of the hardest things to do is break the high school and college inspired writing styles, that stiff formal overly verbose essay style which does nothing but obfuscate. Alec recently told me something along the lines of "yeah, it's all bullshit, but big meaningless words like that will get me a better grade." I wonder if it works the other way, if, after the years of indoctrination into parroting rather than thinking that standard educatuion enforces, people start to read this crap and, on a subconscious level, think "Gee, I can't make any sense of it, it must be really good." Of course that'd explain a whole lot about postmodernism.