Semantics

In college, I took a class on Advertising. As an end-of-semester project, our class was divided into teams of six, and we were instructed to design a marketing campaign to sell grapefruit juice to college students; whichever team was voted to have the best campaign according to the students and the professor got an automatic A on the project. Some teams went crass, some teams appealed to the target audience's intelligence (mistake!). Our team gave up on white grapefruit juice entirely and focused exclusively on pink grapefruit juice, using celebrities as spokespeople and tying in a donation to the Susan G. Komen fund for every bottle sold. Whatever it says about college students or advertising or simply the fight put up from the other teams, our agency won.

Do you get the sense prune advertising was likewise developed by a bunch of college students? For a while now, I've noticed that Sunsweet and the like have shied away from selling "prunes" in favor of "dried plums." Semantics, certainly, but admit it: you associate prunes with nursing homes, scuffly slippers, and worn out bathrobes. "Dried plums" almost has a hipster-y quality to it, riding the tailcoats of dried cranberries as they rose to popularity and are now tossed in everything from cookies to salads to fancy autumn pastas. Well done, Federated Plum Growers of America, on maintaining truth in advertising while simultaneously making prunes an acceptable purchase to people not yet eligible for AARP.

Husband and I were browsing the fruit section at Costco some months back when we saw a label that made us stop in our tracks and consider for a moment. Here was a flat of plums - nicely colored, perfectly in season - that were being sold as "Fresh Prunes." Make of that what you will, America.