Right, and it's the TNG one that's annoying and incorrect! "No *man..."* implies correctly that no human/member of mankind has gone to someplace before. No *one..."* is saying that no sentient/intelligent being has been there before, and it would be a really boring show if they never found anything but dead, uninhabited world's on their trek, wouldn't it?!? I think more recent shows like ST Continues and/or ST:New Voyages may have corrected this egregious error.
As someone named Winston, I just want to voice my personal complaint. I HATE WHEN PEOPLE COMPARE ME TO THE CIGARETTE BRAND!!!! “Like the cigarettes?” Is not what you say to someone named Winston.
I'm just mad that they had Fred Flintstone advertising Winston cigarettes and they didn't change it to "Winstone" for the ad read. "Fred Flintstone smoking Winstone"
While funny, in branding its key to keep the brand name consistent, as you lose effectiveness by changing it, you dont want people to not memorise the brand name. That is the key aspect of advertisement and why its applied in a repeating manner still. #nerdfacts :P
That would have been totally in keeping with the Flintstones aesthetics, too. "Winstone" cigarettes would have been completely appropriate in their world.
@@lucbloom That's a term they especially wanted to avoid when Fred & Barney endorsed Busch beer! As always, beer companies didn't want to imply that their product could get you dangerously intoxicated!
It's facinating how they all went with the thought that "public outrage" and "much higher sells" somehow works against each other so it has to be protest buys or something... Because that's completely normal, as "public outrage" is more like "10% of people who watched it was angry about it", leaving the other 90% open to do what they want, so you can easily have both at the same time without there being some "protest buys" or anything. there is a reason why it's called the "vocal minority", because that's what it is most of the times...
We have a saying in Spanish that is translated to "the dog that barks a lot bites very little". It's a lot of posturing, to be honest. And "outrage" is always very relative.
Especially since outrage from a small group could just expose the brand name more to more people who don't care, making them more likely to buy that brand.
@@milesmartin9624Exactly. Brands like Nike and Gillette have actively sought to outrage vocal minorities by being "woke" because it creates organic content in tweets and discourse which, for example, ad blockers won't block and the public actively seek out rather than skipping.
Also, because it needs to be said, the people outraged by the Trek opening were wrong: there's never been any issue with splitting infinitives in English. However, people used to be taught Latin grammar and generations of teachers wrongly assumed that the rules of Latin grammar must hold for English too.
"To" isn't really part of the infinitive in English either. It's a proposition which is used in many contexts to connect the infinitive to the rest of the sentence. Consider e.g. "What do you want me to do? Take up smoking?" It would sound very odd to make that "To take up smoking?"
Now i need to know. Can someone please tell me where these people think the "boldly" should go instead? "To go boldly.."? "Boldly to go.."? Are you not supposed to add adjectives to infinitives at all in their mind? 😅 All of the variations i can think of actually sound wrong or just bland without it.
I've heard of that in movies, I think just because the actors are unrelated. I doubt it was necessarily true in real life, and I don't really see why it would be necessary in animation either.
@@tobyk.4911They put up the comment and hope it's the first/only comment you see when the video starts. On some devices it can be difficult to full screen the video before seeing the comments - which might be a spoiler.
@@tobyk.4911 so that when you open the video in portrait mode on mobile, you see this comment just below the video, rather than someone else's comment in which they discuss the episode in a spoilery way.
Reminds me of Phentician Dr Geoff Lindsey's video on "got" and "gotten".... Can really recommend that. Or Dr Geoff Lindsey's channel overall, for that matter.
btw the follow-up ad campaign for Winston cigarettes after this fracas had the slogan "What do you want? Good grammar or good taste?" (also, just don't smoke)
It's a similarly outdated idea, but it used to be a sign of bad grammar if you split an infinitive. That is, when you had a "to" followed by a verb, you were never supposed to put anything between them. So the Star Trek opening should have been, "To go boldly where no man has gone before." The reasoning behind this, according to scholars, was that infinitives in Latin were never split. What they often failed to mention was that in Latin, infinitives were one word.
Split infinitive, which is impossible in Latin and therefore we should avoid it in English because Latin is clearly the superior language we all should aspire to speak.
@@arjc5714 It seems Latin is to blame on a lot of these bogus grammatical rules which have no basis on how the English language actually works and only exist to give the grammar police something to complain about. You can't believe the number of times someone has told me I'm not allowed to end a sentence with a preposition.
And so well-known were the complaints about the grammar, that about four years later they ran commercials featuring a (sorry) whiny pedant and a chorus of smokers singing at them "What do you want? Good grammar or good taste?" (Because one has something to do with the other?) Anyway, it all became pointless when cigarette companies stopped TV advertising because they were getting hammered by anti-smoking ads under equal time/PSA rules.
Ohhhh. I thought this was so well known as a complaint that I thought the actual problem would be something else! (I first encountered it in a Bill Bryson book years ago!)
Having seen those ads on youtube before, I thought Tom was getting at the complaint being that the slogan was too catchy and people were mad it was stuck in their head all day.
I want to point out the main NASCAR "League was called tue Winston Cup (sponsored by Winston Cigarettes) until sometime roughly the year 2000. The funny thing was both my dad and I had no idea the name was a sponsorship for Winston Cigarettes until theu announced the change. We thought it was named after somebody like the NHL's Stanley Cup.
Haven't seen it yet, but considering that was still at a time when cigarettes weren't considered bad for you or your health, I doubt it had something to do with this being advertised in a family show. So my guess is that people got annoyed because it broke the immersion with the show.
The ad didn't take place within the show. It was a commercial that aired during commercial breaks in many different shows, just like any other commercial.
Haven't even started to watch, and while I don't know the specifics, being old enough to grow up watching the original Hanna-Barbara show, I will state now that I doubt I will be at all surprised by answer. (yes, I just put this in as another added spoiler shield ;) )
7:58 I'm writing in to complain, that "fracar" should be "fraças" in the English subtitles. Nah, kidding, it's "fracas". Not auto-generated, but manual, amirite?
my guess was that because that slogan has the noise of a lighter being flicked by the characters as part of it, flintstones fans might be upset that bedrock has modern non-dinosaur-powered lighters in it
The fact that mass usage of the Winston cigarette slogan in print advertising, on billboards and on top-rated TV & radio programs predated the debut of the Flintstones' television show by six solid years (1954/1960) makes it clear that as written, this is another literal Lateral load of rubbish. And in fact, there *was* an outcry against the ad appearing on a program watched by so many young children, leading to the ads being pulled in 1963 when toddlers Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm were added to the show's cast.
The Flintstones was a copy of the Honeymooners without the regular threat of spousal violence that the Jackie Gleason show had, I know it was in pathway to 'train' cartoon watchers into adult TV that Hanna Barbara had that also included Top Cat and Wait Til Your Father Gets Home
The idea of poor grammar killing has just derailed my train of thought into considering the potential of misplaced commas and similar in safety legislation
@@KenLieck yeah, that'll just scar you for life, whereas misplaced commas in safety legislation might create loopholes that actually get people maimed or killed
My initial guess: one of the advertisements shows Wilma and Betty doing all the yardwork while Fred and Barney hide from them to smoke their cigarettes. (Spoiler alert: the wives find their husbands at the end.)
Split infinitives (“to boldly go”) are only argued to be “incorrect” because Latin couldn’t do them, which is not a valid rule. It’s a perfectly cromulent thing to do in English, and is both semantically and syntactically appropriate in the Star Trek narration.
Nothing to do with the answer, but the amazement at The Flintstones being an adult show... I guess most Brits wouldn't know that The Flintstones was a takeoff of "The Honeymooners", a brilliant and wildly popular sitcom of the mid fifties. It originated as skits on a variety show, got two full seasons of its own, and was revived as skits on yet another variety show. And I didn't realize/remember the answer, ( D'oh!) which I've known about since the original outrage (thanks to Garry Moore), till Tom mentioned the similar complaint about Star Trek. But I have trouble believing the outrage occurred because of The Flintstones. The slogan was in use in advertising long before The Flintstones. About the grammar... Yeah, I think the US was decades ahead of Britain in abandoning that grammar rule, so it must have been a tiny vocal cadre of grammarians that created the bruhaha. When the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy set off "to boldly split infinitives that had never been split before", the American reaction was "Oh, Brits are still stuck on that?
I was positive it was gonna be be an evolution vs creationism thing, IIRC Flinstones was able to skirt around certain decency laws since they were technically ‘not human’ and weren’t held to the same standards as a typical sitcom family
Regarding the "adult" status of The Flintstones, it was explicitly written as a parody/homage/blatant ripoff (take your pick) of the popular 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners.
To be pedantic: Star Trek version #1 started with "where no man had..." It was later series that made it "no one". Also: Star Trek in the US was just about the same time as UFO in the UK. Look closely at the bridge of the Enterprise and you will see that the only woman there was a black woman handling the phones. On UFO, it was a woman in charge on the moon base. Why being on the moon base made a woman's hair purple was never explained. Captain Kirk's sex life consisted mostly of zipping up one of his boots.
It really was a really big deal at the time - as Tom said, it showed the fluidity of the English language. 🇬🇧 The ad took advantage of/made fun of the complaints of pendants and editors and the like that post-war English was being bastardized (by the damn Yankees, often.) 🇺🇲 I mean, once you'd had arcane grammar rules relentlessly drilled into your brain throughout school, it was a pissoff to be told "nope, 'like' is all good because the language is living and changing. 📖 This is one of the episodes that help me to appreciate being quite old, erm, experienced 😂😂
Compare how the subjunctive is now as standard in U.S. English formed by using "would" instead of the past form of a verb. The grammar books have not caught up with that one even though it has been widely observable for over a decade.
I too am a linguist and maybe it's just my idiolect but nothing about "to boldly go where no one has gone before" sounds even a little bit ungrammatical to me. Is it like a word order issue or something? Like, "boldly go" as opposed to "go boldly"?? That's my best guess but it honestly feels like a pretty weak guess, if that's not the issue then I'm stumped.
5:41 oh the irony that you Tom asks about complaints people still have and then the other Tom says "like" about 10 times in the next sentance. Couldn't have scripted that any better! 😂😂😂
Your panel did not grow up in a culture where smoking was completely normalized. Offering someone a cigarette, or a light for theirs was regarded as a neutral social gesture. Asking if it was ok before lighting up was a way to be polite, but anyone who said "no" needed to offer a reason to maintain the politeness. North America doesn't have a smoking culture now. That is good.
I was always taught (by my mother, the college English / Lit. Professor) that ‘like’ is for cases of comparing two things, whereas ‘as’ is to be used to connect to phrases, or more specifically, when there is a second verb after it. So: Fred Flintsone sounds LIKE Jackie Gleason. - Upon becoming an adult, I don’t find The Flintstones funny, AS I did in my youth.
Not that it's much of a complaint, but surely the phrase "the American public appalled" is a *bit* of an exaggeration in the end, yeah? I can't imagine many people were such strict grammarians, chomping at the bit to criticize such a non-issue. I'd have loved to hear just *how* many complaints they actually got.
In his Tipping Point book, Malcolm Gladwell describes it as a "minor ruckus", so I think it was a bit more than one or two angry letters to the local newspaper. They even turned it into a jingle later on, to take advantage of the commotion caused. -- David
For it (and getting into a car to visit a fast food place and a drive through movie theatre, come to that) to be anachronistic, historians have to have formed a consensus that the Modern Stone Age has actually ended. (-:
@@einootspork I grew up with the show. Anachronisms were handled by implementing them with dinosaurs or birds. For example, the phonograph was a bird. The forklift was a dinosaur. Cars were pushed by foot. They wrote on animal hides. There was no paper. So cigarettes were inconsistent even within the weird Flintstone universe.
The original Star Trek opening was "To boldly go where no man has gone before" it was changed to "no one" for one of the sequels. But yes, more complaints about the grammar than the sexism, but they corrected the sexism but not the grammar. .
"No man" is in Star Trek the TV series and most of the movies, and then was changed at the conclusion of Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country, which crossed over with the "no one" usage for Star Trek The Next Generation TV opening.
I think that's more a case of changing language than sexism. In that case "man" was effectively an abbreviation of "human". Yes, the monologue was changed for "The Next Generation" - the only Star Trek spinoff to use an intro monologue. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country ends with Captain Kirk making his final log entry in which he says "where no man" and then changes it to "where no one".
Because it isn't incorrect. Some people would argue that it is, but they are antiques. Many prescriptivist attitudes toward English grammar are merely restrictive rather than helpful in relaying information. The primary goal of any language should be to enable clear and efficient communication. As well, using man in that way is not sexist. They quite obviously intended man to mean any person (as it can), not specifically a male person. There were plenty of other instances of sexism with regard to Star Trek and it's creators such that complaining about a common turn of phrase is taking away from those real issues.
Is that sexist? The use of man to refer to everyone predates the gendered use of man. I mean, since people are bothered by it it's fine if we change it, but I don't think they were trying to exclude women.
For anyone curious: ruclips.net/video/NAExoSozc2c/видео.htmlsi=0iHXa87pnWaAfHrX One of the original ads. It was a different time when smoking was just a thing adults did and advertising was as common as a coke ad.
"I hate that I'm repeating the slogan. Other brands of cancer sticks are available"
Big Sam Unc is best.
"Someone fall on the sword, and verify that this is not QI. There is no klaxon to fear."
The "don't smoke children" joke is definitely one I'd expect on a Tech Diff video!
he's gearing up in preparation for their return lol
* Gary instantly drops into character as someone who smoked a child *
* riffing ensues *
* the wheel lands on France *
The original Star Trek opening was "Where no man has gone before." It didn't become "no one" until The Next Generation series began.
Not that that detail matters, because the split infinitive of "to boldly go" is in both.
Right, and it's the TNG one that's annoying and incorrect! "No *man..."* implies correctly that no human/member of mankind has gone to someplace before. No *one..."* is saying that no sentient/intelligent being has been there before, and it would be a really boring show if they never found anything but dead, uninhabited world's on their trek, wouldn't it?!?
I think more recent shows like ST Continues and/or ST:New Voyages may have corrected this egregious error.
Also not related but to be pedantic, The original was on a 5 year mission while the next generation was a continuing mission.
@@JimCullenis
As someone named Winston, I just want to voice my personal complaint. I HATE WHEN PEOPLE COMPARE ME TO THE CIGARETTE BRAND!!!! “Like the cigarettes?” Is not what you say to someone named Winston.
Think about how camels must feel...
Should've said "As the cigarettes?"
3:42
The most genuine "What?!" I've heard in my life
I'm just mad that they had Fred Flintstone advertising Winston cigarettes and they didn't change it to "Winstone" for the ad read.
"Fred Flintstone smoking Winstone"
While funny, in branding its key to keep the brand name consistent, as you lose effectiveness by changing it, you dont want people to not memorise the brand name. That is the key aspect of advertisement and why its applied in a repeating manner still. #nerdfacts :P
That would have been totally in keeping with the Flintstones aesthetics, too. "Winstone" cigarettes would have been completely appropriate in their world.
@@WyvernYT no they would get stoned when smoking cigarettes. Too modern.
@@lucbloom That's a term they especially wanted to avoid when Fred & Barney endorsed Busch beer! As always, beer companies didn't want to imply that their product could get you dangerously intoxicated!
Don't smoke kids
their parents would get really angry and you'll end up in prison.
Also just don't smoke, it's bad for you.
And that is why commas are important :D
Don't gamble kids either, the casino won't know what to do with them
Also you'll have a big problem tryna fit them into the slot machines
@@faenethlorhalien Or perhaps a cheeky semicolon: "Don't; smoke kids."
It's facinating how they all went with the thought that "public outrage" and "much higher sells" somehow works against each other so it has to be protest buys or something...
Because that's completely normal, as "public outrage" is more like "10% of people who watched it was angry about it", leaving the other 90% open to do what they want, so you can easily have both at the same time without there being some "protest buys" or anything.
there is a reason why it's called the "vocal minority", because that's what it is most of the times...
We have a saying in Spanish that is translated to "the dog that barks a lot bites very little". It's a lot of posturing, to be honest. And "outrage" is always very relative.
I hate to be the one to do this but "*were angry about it."
Especially since outrage from a small group could just expose the brand name more to more people who don't care, making them more likely to buy that brand.
@@milesmartin9624Exactly. Brands like Nike and Gillette have actively sought to outrage vocal minorities by being "woke" because it creates organic content in tweets and discourse which, for example, ad blockers won't block and the public actively seek out rather than skipping.
It's so in-character for Fred, though. As a working-class guy with a Brooklyn accent (via Ralph Kramden), of course he'd use informal language.
Also, because it needs to be said, the people outraged by the Trek opening were wrong: there's never been any issue with splitting infinitives in English. However, people used to be taught Latin grammar and generations of teachers wrongly assumed that the rules of Latin grammar must hold for English too.
It's not even a rule in Latin. In Latin and (most?) other languages, the infinitive is a single word, inherently unsplittable
"To" isn't really part of the infinitive in English either. It's a proposition which is used in many contexts to connect the infinitive to the rest of the sentence. Consider e.g. "What do you want me to do? Take up smoking?" It would sound very odd to make that "To take up smoking?"
Now i need to know. Can someone please tell me where these people think the "boldly" should go instead? "To go boldly.."? "Boldly to go.."? Are you not supposed to add adjectives to infinitives at all in their mind? 😅 All of the variations i can think of actually sound wrong or just bland without it.
@@BayerischeMeisterWerke I think it’s “””supposed””” to be “to go boldly”
Red shirt Tom's pronunciation of Flinstone as "Flinstun" gets me every time.
I was honestly expecting this to be the answer - that the ad pronounced Flintstone this way to rhyme with Winston and that was what made people angry.
@@Baysha1000 exactly!
The dino is just called Dino
Yes indeed, the “pet” was Dino.
some people back then, were appalled because Fred and Wilma were the first married couple (cartoon or human) to sleep in the same bed, not twin beds 😀
I've heard of that in movies, I think just because the actors are unrelated. I doubt it was necessarily true in real life, and I don't really see why it would be necessary in animation either.
I boldly went on a side quest for the trekkie reference.
I hope the official term for fans of The Flintstones isn't "Flintstoners"
It’s pretty convincing when Tom Scott says it. Let’s all go get a pack of Winstons!
Isn't that a reference from the time Tom gave a live lecture?
Spoiler shield 🛡
+1
what's that?
@@tobyk.4911to stop the top comment from showing directly under the player and spoiling the video
@@tobyk.4911They put up the comment and hope it's the first/only comment you see when the video starts. On some devices it can be difficult to full screen the video before seeing the comments - which might be a spoiler.
@@tobyk.4911 so that when you open the video in portrait mode on mobile, you see this comment just below the video, rather than someone else's comment in which they discuss the episode in a spoilery way.
My first instinct was "1960's America public outrage? Did they make Fred Flinstone black?" Lol
Nice comma interjection at the end there, Tom!
Reminds me of Phentician Dr Geoff Lindsey's video on "got" and "gotten".... Can really recommend that. Or Dr Geoff Lindsey's channel overall, for that matter.
this might be one of my favorite Lateral clips so far. love this one
Initial thoughts: **insert sexual innuendos?**
For a moment in the middle of that I was thinking, "are Winstons actually cigars yet the advert read 'cigarette'?"
i hate how much that slogan is burned into my mind because of the Quinton Reviews Beverly Hillbillies video
Spend some time with WWII era pop culture and you'll have Lucky Strike stuff in your head. "L.S.M.F.T."
btw the follow-up ad campaign for Winston cigarettes after this fracas had the slogan "What do you want? Good grammar or good taste?" (also, just don't smoke)
So can anyone explain what exactly is grammatically wrong with the Star Trek slogan?
The split infinitive, it's something only *really* pedantic people care about
It's a similarly outdated idea, but it used to be a sign of bad grammar if you split an infinitive. That is, when you had a "to" followed by a verb, you were never supposed to put anything between them. So the Star Trek opening should have been, "To go boldly where no man has gone before."
The reasoning behind this, according to scholars, was that infinitives in Latin were never split. What they often failed to mention was that in Latin, infinitives were one word.
"To boldly go" is a split infinitive. Pedants don't want their infinitive's split. They wanted the word boldly to get out from between to and go.
Split infinitive, which is impossible in Latin and therefore we should avoid it in English because Latin is clearly the superior language we all should aspire to speak.
@@arjc5714 It seems Latin is to blame on a lot of these bogus grammatical rules which have no basis on how the English language actually works and only exist to give the grammar police something to complain about. You can't believe the number of times someone has told me I'm not allowed to end a sentence with a preposition.
Must. Smoke.
But 'like' has been used like that since the stone age, I have this cartoon ad to prove it!
And so well-known were the complaints about the grammar, that about four years later they ran commercials featuring a (sorry) whiny pedant and a chorus of smokers singing at them "What do you want? Good grammar or good taste?" (Because one has something to do with the other?)
Anyway, it all became pointless when cigarette companies stopped TV advertising because they were getting hammered by anti-smoking ads under equal time/PSA rules.
Love these 3
Ohhhh. I thought this was so well known as a complaint that I thought the actual problem would be something else! (I first encountered it in a Bill Bryson book years ago!)
And the advent is on RUclips.
Let's Learn Everything has been my absolute favourite podcast for a while now so it is absolutely bizarre to finally see the faces behind it 😅
Sad - I remember this and knew the answer.
So i thought it was going to go in a different direction, which is that Candy Cigarettes are a thing.
You can tell they have never seen a cig commercial. They were stumped pretty good.
pretty WELL ;)
Having seen those ads on youtube before, I thought Tom was getting at the complaint being that the slogan was too catchy and people were mad it was stuck in their head all day.
But we both knew it wasn't about the horrible treatment of their wives in the ad, right?
I don't think the guests would've ever got it without that Star Trek hint 🤣 [I certainly wouldn't've]
Winston was the main protagonist in the book 1984.Perhaps they were upset that Fred ate John Hurt.
Oh! I'm not done yet but as soon as I saw the words, I think I knew. It's gotta be a specific word.
Yep, it was the word I thought.
I want to point out the main NASCAR "League was called tue Winston Cup (sponsored by Winston Cigarettes) until sometime roughly the year 2000. The funny thing was both my dad and I had no idea the name was a sponsorship for Winston Cigarettes until theu announced the change. We thought it was named after somebody like the NHL's Stanley Cup.
Cartoon character selling cigarettes, absolutely fine. Back in the day when smoking was good for you :)
My guess is that everything in Flintstones World is named after rocks, but "Winston" isn't, so they wouldn't be canon.
Should have had Tim the Traveller on for this question about pedantry.
My brain instantly went to the flintstones being set before cigarettes were invented and thus it created lore plot holes.
Winston and Salem cigarettes were named for the city of Winston-Salem (North Carolina).
Witch is why they were so hot!
Haven't seen it yet, but considering that was still at a time when cigarettes weren't considered bad for you or your health, I doubt it had something to do with this being advertised in a family show. So my guess is that people got annoyed because it broke the immersion with the show.
The ad didn't take place within the show. It was a commercial that aired during commercial breaks in many different shows, just like any other commercial.
The Flintstones also did a massive campaign with Busch beer at around the same time, so they had no problem using them to market adult products.
And here we have some delicious food for the algorithm ;-)
New drinking game. Take a sip every time Tom Lum says «like». 😅
Ought it would be that the ad was integrated into the show and not separate.
Product placement in TV shows is still common.
I heard for re-broadcasts they will go as far as digitally replacing posters with updated ads.
Haven't even started to watch, and while I don't know the specifics, being old enough to grow up watching the original Hanna-Barbara show, I will state now that I doubt I will be at all surprised by answer.
(yes, I just put this in as another added spoiler shield ;) )
I knew it was going to be the grammar. So, the grammar police are not a new phenomenon.
The Flintstones were an direct adaptation of the popular show "The Honeymooners". Many many of the Flintstone's episodes are direct copies.
Unfortunately the campaign was dropped after Fred was diagnosed with cancer of the caveman
7:58 I'm writing in to complain, that "fracar" should be "fraças" in the English subtitles. Nah, kidding, it's "fracas". Not auto-generated, but manual, amirite?
Could someone dumb down what's wrong with the tng opening?
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
3:10 is it my pavlovian reaction from the QI klaxon, but we need a klaxon-lite here
It was Karen, karenating around, like a good Karen should.
Yeesh, considering it was teh 60s, you'd think people would've been mad at blue-collar icon Fred Flintstone selling out to shill a big brand.
I think I have to push the thumbs up button now and not the reverse that seems a'like
thank you for not putting a ciggie in the thumbnail
TIL that using "like" for similes is a relatively recent evolution of the English language. Huh.
my guess was that because that slogan has the noise of a lighter being flicked by the characters as part of it, flintstones fans might be upset that bedrock has modern non-dinosaur-powered lighters in it
The fact that mass usage of the Winston cigarette slogan in print advertising, on billboards and on top-rated TV & radio programs predated the debut of the Flintstones' television show by six solid years (1954/1960) makes it clear that as written, this is another literal Lateral load of rubbish. And in fact, there *was* an outcry against the ad appearing on a program watched by so many young children, leading to the ads being pulled in 1963 when toddlers Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm were added to the show's cast.
The Flintstones was a copy of the Honeymooners without the regular threat of spousal violence that the Jackie Gleason show had, I know it was in pathway to 'train' cartoon watchers into adult TV that Hanna Barbara had that also included Top Cat and Wait Til Your Father Gets Home
Only in Tom Scott's accent (which he relaxes into on the second read, rather than staying R.P.) does "Winston" rhyme with "Flintstone". (-:
it's British. Livingstone is pronounced Livingstun, Featherstone is pronounced Featherstun....
My guess was that it wasn't the same voice actor as in The Flintstones, and people were outraged because Fred didn't sound right.
Honestly thought it was going to be people upset since paper does not (yet) exist in the Flinstones universe
The idea of poor grammar killing has just derailed my train of thought into considering the potential of misplaced commas and similar in safety legislation
Worse than the unfortunately titled Bill Cosby book "Come On People", you mean?
@@KenLieck yeah, that'll just scar you for life, whereas misplaced commas in safety legislation might create loopholes that actually get people maimed or killed
I've actually seen that ad. It's literally just Fred and Barney sitting by a tree lighting up cigarettes and talking about them. Totally benign.
My initial guess: one of the advertisements shows Wilma and Betty doing all the yardwork while Fred and Barney hide from them to smoke their cigarettes. (Spoiler alert: the wives find their husbands at the end.)
Guess at start: because cigarettes didn't exist in the stone age?
Split infinitives (“to boldly go”) are only argued to be “incorrect” because Latin couldn’t do them, which is not a valid rule. It’s a perfectly cromulent thing to do in English, and is both semantically and syntactically appropriate in the Star Trek narration.
The Flintstones was the longest running animated program in American TV history when The Simpsons débuted.
Nothing to do with the answer, but the amazement at The Flintstones being an adult show...
I guess most Brits wouldn't know that The Flintstones was a takeoff of "The Honeymooners", a brilliant and wildly popular sitcom of the mid fifties. It originated as skits on a variety show, got two full seasons of its own, and was revived as skits on yet another variety show.
And I didn't realize/remember the answer, ( D'oh!) which I've known about since the original outrage (thanks to Garry Moore), till Tom mentioned the similar complaint about Star Trek. But I have trouble believing the outrage occurred because of The Flintstones. The slogan was in use in advertising long before The Flintstones.
About the grammar... Yeah, I think the US was decades ahead of Britain in abandoning that grammar rule, so it must have been a tiny vocal cadre of grammarians that created the bruhaha. When the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy set off "to boldly split infinitives that had never been split before", the American reaction was "Oh, Brits are still stuck on that?
I was positive it was gonna be be an evolution vs creationism thing, IIRC Flinstones was able to skirt around certain decency laws since they were technically ‘not human’ and weren’t held to the same standards as a typical sitcom family
Regarding the "adult" status of The Flintstones, it was explicitly written as a parody/homage/blatant ripoff (take your pick) of the popular 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners.
To be pedantic:
Star Trek version #1 started with "where no man had..." It was later series that made it "no one".
Also:
Star Trek in the US was just about the same time as UFO in the UK. Look closely at the bridge of the Enterprise and you will see that the only woman there was a black woman handling the phones. On UFO, it was a woman in charge on the moon base. Why being on the moon base made a woman's hair purple was never explained. Captain Kirk's sex life consisted mostly of zipping up one of his boots.
Just guessing: the out rage was because the sales were to children possibly age restrictions on cigarettes wasnt a thing at that time?
It really was a really big deal at the time - as Tom said, it showed the fluidity of the English language. 🇬🇧
The ad took advantage of/made fun of the complaints of pendants and editors and the like that post-war English was being bastardized (by the damn Yankees, often.) 🇺🇲
I mean, once you'd had arcane grammar rules relentlessly drilled into your brain throughout school, it was a pissoff to be told "nope, 'like' is all good because the language is living and changing. 📖
This is one of the episodes that help me to appreciate being quite old, erm, experienced 😂😂
Compare how the subjunctive is now as standard in U.S. English formed by using "would" instead of the past form of a verb. The grammar books have not caught up with that one even though it has been widely observable for over a decade.
I too am a linguist and maybe it's just my idiolect but nothing about "to boldly go where no one has gone before" sounds even a little bit ungrammatical to me. Is it like a word order issue or something? Like, "boldly go" as opposed to "go boldly"?? That's my best guess but it honestly feels like a pretty weak guess, if that's not the issue then I'm stumped.
5:41 oh the irony that you Tom asks about complaints people still have and then the other Tom says "like" about 10 times in the next sentance. Couldn't have scripted that any better! 😂😂😂
Here I was worried the whole time that it'd be "Winston tastes good" sounded too Homosexual™ for the masses when said by Fred.
Your panel did not grow up in a culture where smoking was completely normalized. Offering someone a cigarette, or a light for theirs was regarded as a neutral social gesture. Asking if it was ok before lighting up was a way to be polite, but anyone who said "no" needed to offer a reason to maintain the politeness. North America doesn't have a smoking culture now. That is good.
The commercial I've seen with that slogan and those characters has Wilma and Betty doing housework while Fred and Barney relax.
Because 1960s
3:07 The Flintstones were controversial because they were the first married couple that were shown to sleep in the same bed on TV.
Could it be that...
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Not that I think 'like' is wrong but this does kind of make me want to use 'as' more.
Weirdly (or at least I find it so) I tend to think of it as "like xxx should" but if I use "any" in there it is "as any xxx should".
I was always taught (by my mother, the college English / Lit. Professor) that ‘like’ is for cases of comparing two things, whereas ‘as’ is to be used to connect to phrases, or more specifically, when there is a second verb after it. So: Fred Flintsone sounds LIKE Jackie Gleason. - Upon becoming an adult, I don’t find The Flintstones funny, AS I did in my youth.
What do you guys think is Toms fursona?
cat. duck would be funny too.
Not that it's much of a complaint, but surely the phrase "the American public appalled" is a *bit* of an exaggeration in the end, yeah? I can't imagine many people were such strict grammarians, chomping at the bit to criticize such a non-issue. I'd have loved to hear just *how* many complaints they actually got.
In his Tipping Point book, Malcolm Gladwell describes it as a "minor ruckus", so I think it was a bit more than one or two angry letters to the local newspaper. They even turned it into a jingle later on, to take advantage of the commotion caused. -- David
the people who complained are like really pedantic
you mean are as really pedantic :p
But did Fred get stoned for making this grammatical error dough?
Flintstones fans are clearly Flint-stoners
Grammar might not be killing Americans, but Americans have been wilfully killing grammar for decades...
And the anachronism of prehistoric cavemen smoking cigarettes wasn't the issue?
For it (and getting into a car to visit a fast food place and a drive through movie theatre, come to that) to be anachronistic, historians have to have formed a consensus that the Modern Stone Age has actually ended. (-:
I've never even watched the show and even I know that the whole premise was deliberately anachronistic. Do you live under a rock?
@@einootspork I grew up with the show. Anachronisms were handled by implementing them with dinosaurs or birds. For example, the phonograph was a bird. The forklift was a dinosaur. Cars were pushed by foot. They wrote on animal hides. There was no paper.
So cigarettes were inconsistent even within the weird Flintstone universe.
The original Star Trek opening was "To boldly go where no man has gone before" it was changed to "no one" for one of the sequels. But yes, more complaints about the grammar than the sexism, but they corrected the sexism but not the grammar. .
"No man" is in Star Trek the TV series and most of the movies, and then was changed at the conclusion of Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country, which crossed over with the "no one" usage for Star Trek The Next Generation TV opening.
Well, the grammar is not really wrong in the first place. (-:
I think that's more a case of changing language than sexism. In that case "man" was effectively an abbreviation of "human".
Yes, the monologue was changed for "The Next Generation" - the only Star Trek spinoff to use an intro monologue.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country ends with Captain Kirk making his final log entry in which he says "where no man" and then changes it to "where no one".
Because it isn't incorrect. Some people would argue that it is, but they are antiques. Many prescriptivist attitudes toward English grammar are merely restrictive rather than helpful in relaying information. The primary goal of any language should be to enable clear and efficient communication.
As well, using man in that way is not sexist. They quite obviously intended man to mean any person (as it can), not specifically a male person. There were plenty of other instances of sexism with regard to Star Trek and it's creators such that complaining about a common turn of phrase is taking away from those real issues.
Is that sexist? The use of man to refer to everyone predates the gendered use of man. I mean, since people are bothered by it it's fine if we change it, but I don't think they were trying to exclude women.
But we don't have grammar rules in the us because our dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive. Tom even did a video or two about it.
For anyone curious: ruclips.net/video/NAExoSozc2c/видео.htmlsi=0iHXa87pnWaAfHrX
One of the original ads. It was a different time when smoking was just a thing adults did and advertising was as common as a coke ad.