Bucket of Does

I saw a billboard advertising the new Droid cell phone yesterday. It had a hard-edged and manly sort of high-tech industrial look to it, and it said:

A BARE-KNUCKLED BUCKET OF DOES.

Now, the Droid ad campaign has centered around the idea that there's lots of stuff that the iPhone doesn't do, but that "Droid Does."

So the advertisers can perhaps be forgiven for assuming that everyone would see the word "DOES" as a verb and pronounce it like "duzz."

But for just a moment, as I glanced at the billboard, I saw the word "DOES" as a plural noun, and pronounced it like "doze."

And I wondered: a bare-knuckled bucket full of female deer? Huh?

4 Responses to “Bucket of Does”

  1. Chris Devers

    Yes, there’s the forest animal misstep on a linguistic level, but also the fact that they’re putting the eye of HAL, the homicidal maniac supercomputer from 2001, as the “face” of this phone.

    Maybe they figure that balancing Bambi & HAL cancels out?

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  2. Anonymous

    I didn’t understand they were nounifying a verb til days after first driving past the billboard, having tacitly convinced myself of the idea that it was a cute/edgy mashup, like “a ship of bunny rabbits wearing viking helmets,” or “a pack of nun-chuck-wielding puppies swinging “

    I always felt that HAL was the most human character in 2001. The droid eye makes me think more of LOTR’s eye of sauron though.

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  3. irilyth

    Speaking of English profanity, I have occasionally used the phrase “bucket of roosters”, riffing on JWZ’s highly evocative “I hope you choke on a bucket of cocks”.

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  4. Kev

    I drove by one of these billboards this morning and interpreted it as “deformed female deer in a large plastic container” as well.

    Maybe this phrase would work better if it were sounded out on a radio or TV ad, although people of a certain age might hear “bucket of duzz” and think that DUZ laundry detergent was being brought back…

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