The television advertisement for Leaf Filter drives me batty. They tell me that they can install over your gutters and keep leaves and other debris out of the gutters. But to me, gutters aren’t a part of the house. They exist only in bowling.
Since this commercial is fed to me on a regular basis, you would think that the company is paying a lot. But they didn’t bother to do their research. In my area, roof gutters are always referred to as eavestroughs. Why didn’t Leaf Filter bother uncovering this and figure out that referring to eavestroughs as gutters would piss off their potential customers? If I were in the market for such a system, I would ignore Leaf Filter’s pleas and go for a different system. Petty? Yes. Do your research next time.
I like how American television shows are set in various locations around the country. Friends was set in New York, Married With Children was set in Chicago, the NCISes tell you what city they’re in and Cheers was set in Boston. How’s that for being inclusive when most of these shows were shot in Hollywood?
But that same Cheers has precisely no one in the cast with a Boston accent. Now I’ve never been to Boston so I don’t know that everyone would have a Boston accent. Boston is a big center that I’m sure attracts people from all over the country, most of whom wouldn’t have the famed accent. Still, in a setting like the Cheers bar, I think almost everyone would have an accent. Only Frasier is likely to be an out-of-towner. So this leads to the question: Aren’t Bostonians more pissed off than pleased with Cheers’ portrayal of the locals?
My answer is up above in the abuse of the word gutter. I would be annoyed.
But then again, After suffering through a million books and television shows that have New York as their setting, you might be happy to see Boston used as a setting for a change. You can chalk up the strange accents as just a way to make Boston more easily understood by the outside.
Honestly I think I am going to puke if I hear another story where different boroughs of New York are named for different settings of the work. Unless you set up the boroughs as being very different from each other, I don’t care because I don’t live there. Now if you said the crime happened in Staten Island because most if not all New York crimes occur in Staten Island, I would be intrigued. Otherwise, don’t waste my time.
It sounds like it’s a mixed blessing having your town become a setting. Perhaps it’s good to make some of your in jokes national or even international. Perhaps it’s bad to have your town reduced to a few stereotypes one show chooses to represent. Whether you see it as mixed well or badly might simply come down to whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Or whether you’re a Bostonian who says gutters when you should be saying eavestroughs.
