I was hanging out with a group of friends the other night and they were all referencing this over-the-top ridiculous television spot for some home gym I’d never heard of. A tidal wave of presumptively hostile Staten Island accents and aggressive muscle flexes crashed into the rocks that were my unprepared eyes and ears from every other body in the room. This unsettled me as I watch TV pretty much all day and have an inhuman degree of focus and retention for advertisements, especially the ridiculous ones. And then, last night, during a post-midnight airing of the Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget, there it was… the Body By Jake Tower 200:
First and foremost, I am not the target demographic for this commercial. I care about fitness, I try to eat right and work out regularly, but I have no interest in “getting crazy” with an “eleven-minute body-shredding routine.” They also seem to really emphasize that this equipment will make you “bigger, harder, stronger,” which really just sounds like it’s overcompensating for something, right? Also, I don’t think you should EVER look like this guy to the right while working out. That just seems unhealthy. He looks like Bane in Batman: The Animated Series just before his veins get overfilled with toxin and he explodes!
Here’s my biggest problem, though. The tagline “Gotta Door? You Gotta Gym.” I don’t think these guys know what the word “gotta” means. Yes, it sounds aggressive and tough, which seems to be what they were going for, but “gotta” is a replacement term for “got to” or “have to,” as in “I have got to get to the hospital before my heart busts through my freakishly large muscular neck.” They’re using it in place of “got a” which – aside from being typographically identical to “gotta” minus one letter – is used in statements like “who’s got a credit card so I can buy this worthless crap?” You can say “Christ, the cops are here. We gotta make a run for it,” but you can’t say “My sister gotta abortion yesterday,” and not just because “abortion” starts with a vowel so you’d want it to be “gottan” (although “abortion” could be a verb… but then “gotta abortion” would imply that she had a deep desire to perform abortions, which is again unsettling).
For that matter, the tagline seems to imply that “you” is taking the place of “you’ve” or “you have.” What they’re trying to say is “If you’ve got a door, then you’ve got a gym.” but by using “gotta” they’re making the words that follow into active verbs, so what it actually says is “Have to door (as in actively construct and/or use doors)? You have to gym (as in play while keeping physically active, like at a gymnasium).” That’s the most sense I can make out of the line, and even that’s pretty much nonsense. I know you’re marketing your wall-based workout equipment to mixed martial arts fans who watch Comedy Central after midnight, but somebody somewhere still has to care about proper usage of grammar in the English language, right?
This is probably why I got beat up in high school…
