WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE "READY"…?

Sometimes I'm really not very observant.

Now - perhaps you shouldn't tell my doctor this but - my daily packed lunch tends to include at least one bag of crisps and, the other day, as I was piling my way through them in the usual manner, I had cause to pause and put the packet down onto my desk because I suddenly needed to do something else.

I'm not sure now what the "something else" might have been, but it probably involved trying to get a dribbled bit of mustard off the front of my jumper...

Anyway, despite the rest of the crisp-buying world probably having been well aware of this for years, I only noticed this that recently, because, (pause for dramatic effect) on the packs printed by the brand which I'm currently buying because they're "on offer" in the supermarket (perhaps because they always seem to taste slightly stale to me), the word "Ready" seems to have completely disappeared from the description of the flavour of the delights contained within the shiny packaging.

I imagine that the perceived staleness is an age thing, and has little to do with the no doubt excellent product being created by the manufacturer in question, by the way.

The thing is that I know why they were called "Ready Salted" in the first place, despite me being somewhat bemused by the wording when I was a heart-clogging young whippersnapper. It dates (as if you didn't know) back to when the crisps on sale were generally not ready salted and buyers had to put their own salt on their crisps after fishing out a little bag of salt from amidst their bag of potatoey delights.

I know! Do it yourself snacking! It must seem as if it was the dark ages when I was growing up, what with that and having to get up to switch TV channels or turn over a record...

Then, in some crisp company somewhere, one bright day along comes some Smart Alec who points out that, like bread-makers pre-slicing loaves of bread, the crisp-maker could pre-salt the crisps and sell it to the customers as an exciting new extra feature and so the "Ready Salted" crisp is born.

Well, I suppose it is rather redundant phrase now, given that the readiness of the salting is pretty much standard (with the exception of "Salt'n'Shake" of course), and I suppose it had a pretty good long  run at being considered an exciting new idea, but, now that I've noticed its absence, I find myself rather missing it, not least because the word "salted" looks so small and lost in that great big area of red space.

Sigh...! And so language and society moves on. Perhaps - as the song says - we won't know what we've lost 'til it's gone. Certainly I presume that tired old fuddy-duddies like myself are meant to be left behind, trailing in its wake, but, as greater people than I have pointed out, such is the way of the world.

Meanwhile, I shall be mentally preparing another little posting concerning the use of the 'n' in marketing... ;-)