Thursday, April 10, 2008

Throwing the first stone in a glass house

One of the Around the Block market comments in the Irish Times property supplement today discusses a piece of marketing from Owenass for a development in Portlaoise: a 20-page magazine devoted to the Esker Hills development, that the writer reckons is a first in terms of marketing developments in Ireland.

It's the comment that 'The magazine includes "articles" about the residential market' that I find interesting. Articles being put in inverted commas suggests that (of course) they are not the same as "articles" in newspapers such as the Irish Times, that is, articles with a capital A, you might say. Inverted commas used like this are usually about highlighting something unreliable in the use of the word in the context: here, that the articles cannot be taken as "independent".

The example given by Around the Block is that the magazine articles about the market PREDICTABLY suggest that "it's a buyers' market don't ya know". The tone achieved by the 'don't ya know' is the belittling device.

I have one question to put, rhetorically, on this matter: How many "articles" have you read in the Irish Times property supplement that mention negative things about the houses they are describing (and which happen also to be "advertised" in the very same supplement, don't ya know)?

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