Okay, enough rock music, back to the peeves.
Today’s is “everyday.” “Everyday” is an adjective meaning normal, ordinary, mundane. If you want to say your product or service is common and undistinguished, that’s the word you should use. However, if you want to say it is available all the time, or that it should be used daily, you want to say “every day.” So, to take the most egregious example, “Toyota: Everyday” was probably not what Toyota really wanted to say.
You’re right, that probably isn’t what Toyota meant to say, but somehow I don’t think that blunder has anything to do with why they recently posted their first quarterly loss ever, why they are idling plants. Probably there were no consequences to them for their mistake. And I think that’s part of why our public language has gotten so sloppy, no adverse consequences. It doesn’t matter. Probably no more than two other people noticed that.
I don’t mean to imply that I don’t appreciate your insight. I do. I remember well many years ago that you were regularly noticing things such as a punctuation error on a billboard that completely changed the meaning. Things that I wouldn’t have noticed, but enjoyed having pointed out. I wish more people were paying that close attention to the onslaught of poor verbal expression that is all too normal in this culture, so called.
Those that don’t learn from mistakes of usage are doomed to repeat them, if I may.
That’s funny that you should make such a connection. I was not even thinking of the current woes of the auto industry when I decided to mention Toyota. The thing that actually stirred me to post about it was a Menards billboard: “Low prices everyday!” But since no one outside the American midwest has ever heard of Menards, I decided Toyota would be a better example.
My all-time favorite has to be the hand-lettered sign I once saw on one of a pair of double doors at a Wal-Mart:
OTHER DOOR
BROKEN
Isn’t that just a perfect storm of ambiguity?