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Recently finished Dorothy L. Sayers _Murder Must Advertise_, a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, courtesy of a conversion by Patricia in the MR Ebooks section.
“How about truth in advertising?”
“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There’s yeast in bread, but you can’t make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow. Which incidentally brings me to the delicate and important distinction between the words ‘with’ and ‘from.’ Suppose you are advertising lemonade, or, not to be invidious, we will say perry. If you say ‘Our perry is made from fresh-plucked pears only,’ then it’s got to be made from pears only, or the statement is actionable; if you just say it is made ‘from pears,’ without the ‘only,’ the betting is that it is probably made chiefly of pears; but if you say, ‘made with pears,’ you generally mean that you use a peck of pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you—such are the niceties of our English tongue.”
Just wonderful.
Sayers _Clouds of Witness_ (also from an MR conversion) currently in process, along with Philip Pullman's _The Golden Compass_, and a re-read of E. E. Smith's _First Lensman_.
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Dennis
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