Well, many of you have read, I’m sure by now, that Jerry Seinfeld has signed to advertise Windows Vista for a tidy sum. Hence the lame joke in the post title.

But what this post is really about is stupid language. Over on slashdot, they had a post discussing the acquisition of Jerry Seinfeld by Microsoft and they quoted somebody saying “Mac users might be quite amused, considering that (like many other TV shows) the set of Seinfeld always had a Macintosh prominently displayed in the background.”

Nothing is prominently displayed in the background. Now, I don’t consider this an oxymoron, because dictionaries tend to describe oxymora as phrases which are seemingly self-contradicting. There’s nothing seeming about this. It is impossible for something to be prominently displayed in the background. Something can be prominent in the background, but “prominently displayed” implies that it’s the visual target of a given landscape and things in the background are never that.

The real problem here is that the context was ignored. “Prominently displayed” is a common phrase but connecting it to “background” belies its original intention. Context is everything when it comes to language. That’s why the spell checker in Office 2007 is so much better than any previous one: it verifies the words in the sentence in relation to each other to see if the words make sense in that order and in that context. It’s something people should try more often.