Scott:

I've never seen the ad in question, but I gather that the $ sign is a
superscript, and it looked something like this:


$6avory sandwiches

I think what our correspondence is showing is not that one of us is right
and the other wrong, but that different people's neural wiring and visual
perceptions are different. I'm guessing that when a significant number of
people (including you) look at it, the word "savory" is not immediately
apparent to them, while another group (including me and the ad's creator)
see both "$6" and "savory" right away. If so, the ad will only be effective
for the latter group. If the former group is large, then the merchant should
abandon the ad.

It's probably also true that a 6 looks more like an "S" in some type face
than others.

Dick


On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Scott Catledge <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I really like wordplay but you are ignoring the dollars: $6 is read in
> English as six dollars--not dollars six.  This reads as
> if it were written by a non-native speaker of English.  We used to speak
> "franglais" in college, using the French for very bad
> puns in English; however, none violated English syntax.
>

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