10 pounds of apples

So okay, I think I've mentioned this to some of you before but I don't think I've posted on it.

The brand of apple cider that I buy a lot of advertises prominently on its gallon jugs: "Made from 10 pounds of apples!" And I'm sure that the main purpose of saying so is just to make the buyer think, 'Wow, that's a lot of apples!' and not really analyze it further than that. But you know me better than to expect that I'd do just that.

So I'm thinking, what exactly is it that's so impressive about 10 pounds of apples? (Note that a gallon of cider itself weighs about 8 pounds.) Is it:

• we're supposed to be impressed by what a large mass of apples has been stuffed into each jug of cider? E.g., if they only used one pound of apples in producing each jug of cider, that would clearly produce much less than a gallon's worth of pure apple product, and they'd have to fill up the rest of the jug with water and other non-apple ingredients. So, "10 pounds of apples" means 'the contents of this jug is all apple, no filler', and 10 pounds is a large number.

Or is it:

• we're supposed to be impressed by how much of the apples has been stuffed into each jug of cider? E.g., if they used 100 pounds of apples in producing each jug of cider, then that would mean only 8% of the total mass of each apple makes it into the cider. But what differentiates cider from apple juice is the fact that cider isn't filtered to remove pulp—which means that cider contains a greater proportion of the mass of each apple than apple juice does. So, "10 pounds of apples" means 'this apple cider is rich and unfiltered, with fully 80% of the mass of each apple ending up in the jug', and 10 pounds is an impressively small number.

I find both of these arguments compelling! And yet in a certain sense they're incompatible, and therefore "10 pounds of apples" is uninformative—you could in principle say "10 pounds of apples" if you only used 8% of the mass of each apple and then filled up the rest of the jug with seven pints of water and filler. I guess the "from" in "made from 10 pounds of apples" is doing a lot of work here?

Famous persons in sociolinguistics?

Incidentally, one of the coauthors of the paper whose abstract I mentioned in yesterday's post is a master's student in linguistics at North Carolina State by the name of "Michael J. Fox".

I really hope this guy comes to Penn to do his PhD, so that he can join the ranks of other distinguished Penn linguistics PhDs like David Bowie and Julia Roberts.

The Hess Truck

Every year around this time I start seeing commercials for the Hess truck. These are commercials for a toy truck, which itself is an advertisement for a gas station, that feature a children's choir singing a parody of the 1963 pop song "My Boyfriend's Back". I'm not sure why exactly I find this combination of elements so unutterably bizarre, but I can't deny that I do. The commercials just mystify me for some reason. I wonder if this is due in part to the fact that I'd never heard of the Hess truck before I was let's say 25 or so, but I'm really not sure.

In unrelated news, it must be kind of embarrassing for Alex Trebek to have said "I just got a look at the Final Jeopardy! clue, and I bet someone will be going home with a big payday tonight" and then have no one get the right answer.