What springs to mind when you hear the phrase ‘chicken festival'? Perhaps a whole marquee of preened show-poultry, next to a fried marinated chicken stand, next to a cookery tips class, next to a ‘chicken on the trot' race... maybe. What doesn't immediately come to mind, is a pizza. How can a pizza be a ‘chicken festival' you may well ask yourself. This is actually a real thing — a ‘chicken festival' pizza, if you can believe it. It's not a chicken festival — it's a pizza.

This epitomises one of my pet hates — the ridiculous claims of advertising and/or misuse of terminology.

I also find it quite irritating to see the word ‘refreshing' on items such as face wash or shower gel. Isn't it up to me if I find it refreshing or not? Advertisers and branding agencies shouldn't be telling me that I will or won't be refreshed — perhaps I might wake up one morning, use a face wash and feel thoroughly unrefreshed. And can shower gel really be ‘refreshing'? I suppose not many of us evaluate our post-shower feelings of cleanliness to this extent, but I've certainly never thought to myself, ‘Oh my, how refreshing that refreshing shower gel is'. It is just glorified liquid soap after all.

Tall promises

‘Delicious' is another word bandied around packaging far too much in my opinion. If I was offered a ‘delicious' bowl of brussels sprouts, they would be quite disgusting (I hate sprouts). Just because they say it's delicious, doesn't mean it is.

To be fair, advertising has come a long way since its dawn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You don't really see adverts promising to make you a millionaire from simply taking one blue tablet, or notions that drinking a tonic might make you into a superhero (ad regulations have made sure of this). There were also (probably) hundreds of hair-loss remedy adverts, promising to take men back to their former glory days of mane-headed bushiness.

However, it still does surprise me how advertisements can be allowed to intimate certain things — such as how having a paler face might make you into a successful journalist or fashion designer. Maybe that's just me.

Another pet hate of mine is the insistence of food outlets to transform verbs into nouns. A ‘steak melt' for instance, is a grilled sandwich. Melt is a verb, according to Chambers Dictionary: melt verb (melted, melting) tr & intr 1 (sometimes melt down or melt something down) to make or become soft or liquid, especially through the action of heat; to dissolve (something solid).

So it can't be ‘a melt'. It could be a ‘melted cheese sandwich' or even a ‘melted sandwich' if you wanted to go all Dali-esque, but a ‘steak melt'. That just doesn't make sense. I deliberately will not buy something with such a ridiculous name, however ‘delicious' it might be.

‘Trustworthy' is something else that doesn't belong on the wrappers of food, beverages or anything at all to be honest.

Regulations

A ‘trustworthy' water or a brand you can ‘trust' — what does that really mean?

Give the packet of frozen peas Dh5 to hold and it won't steal it from you? Leave your young children in the care of a five-gallon bottle of ‘refreshing, trustworthy' water and they won't come to any harm?

Perhaps this is what advertising regulations have forced the industry to resort to. A ridiculously refreshing and delicious — but trustworthy — melted sandwich.