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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