Velcro Doesn't Go

 "VELCRO DOESN’T GO THIS WELL TOGETHER."

Um, okay.

I mean, I know what you mean, okay? I just don’t like it. At all.

            The good news: It's a sentence. So it deserves that period. Which is rare enough in advertising that we can spend a microsecond celebrating. But I don’t even know where to begin to make it stop hurting.

            Simply switching the words around (sometimes the easiest fix) doesn’t help:

VELCRO DOESN’T GO TOGETHER THIS WELL.

            Um, no.

            A core problem is that Velcro is actually a company, not a thing that “goes together.” I’ll grant you that many people call hook-and-loop fasteners by the trademark name “Velcro,” but that doesn’t make it right. Nor does it change what I suspect is the fundamental problem: that the item in question is rarely perceived as being composed of constituent pieces. Which I suppose is what the “Milk Every Moment” people had in mind.

But it doesn’t work! To the innocent reader, Velcro—or, rather, a hook-and-loop fastener—really doesn’t suggest a two-halves-make-a-whole unit. Case in point: just by rendering its generic name singular rather than plural, I fear that I have put a kink into that last sentence.

So to make this ad make sense (from a language usage point of view), you almost have to do:

THE TWO CONTRASTING STRIPS OF A HOOK-AND-LOOP FASTENER DON’T GO TOGETHER THIS WELL.

            And by that time, you might as well fortify yourself with that milk-and-grilled-cheese snack, because you’ve lost your ad. And let's not even address the condition of the billboard.

            But this makes me happy, anyway, and not because I have now introduced you to the option of calling this wonderful invention by its generic name. That is pleasing in its own right—even more so because it gives you all the opportunity to practice the proper deployment of your hyphens. No, it makes me happy because I did not know that “Velcro” is a portmanteau of two French words (both of which exist in English with slightly different meanings): velours (“velvet”) and crochet (“hook”). Thank you, Wikipedia. Thank you, George de Mestral. Thank you, English.