I'm sure you've all noticed a changing landscape regarding the sizing/labelling of products over the past 5 years or so. Like fast food chains that dropped the term "small," and now they have large, extra large, and colon-buster. I can understand that, as this is America, dammit, and we don't want no small nothin'. Then there's Starbucks, with sizes tall, grande, and venti. Of course, "tall" actually refers to small, and "grande" is medium. Same concept, only trendier, I guess.
But how about labels that just don't make sense? Today I stopped at a gas station/car wash. There were four different levels of car-washing I could choose from. From lowest quality wash to highest, those levels were labelled as follows:
1. Deluxe Wash
2. Ultimate Wash
3. Triple Wash
4. Extreme Wash
So here's the deal. You want to start with "deluxe" rather than "basic" or the like? I understand that. Deluxe just sounds better, and that's the point. But from deluxe, you move up to "ultimate." Here's where it gets problemmatic. How can something described as "ultimate" be only third best? Did the people who designed this system not know what "ultimate" means? Try the following: not to be improved upon or surpassed; greatest; unsurpassed. In other words, they are claiming to improve upon something that they also imply cannot possibly be improved upon. How, you ask? Do it a third time. Seems like if something has already been done perfectly, doing it a third time does nothing. The law of diminishing returns has to come into play.
And don't even get me started on "extreme." Maybe whoever designed this was just a fan of Harold and Kumar. Still, as a wise man once said, "read a book, nigga."
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