Egregious Error? No, Just a ‘Lite’ Mistake

As my readers know, I allow myself only two errors of fact or grammar a year. I have sometimes exceeded that quota in one column. I depend on readers to point them out, and sometimes they fail me.

However, I have no argument against a complaint made by Todd A. Cooley about a mistake I made in a column about my wife’s 60th reunion of her grammar school graduation class in Bakersfield.

“I must regretfully inform you,” he writes, “that your column included an egregious error. The critical question: Does your annual mistake allotment pertain only to grammatical errors, or do proper names apply?”

I assure Cooley and everyone else that I include both. An error is an error.

“While I was delighted to note your sister-in-law’s thoughtfulness in including a fine brew in her picnic basket and pleased that it helped raise your spirits,” he goes on, “I must sternly reprimand you for referring to this esteemed libation as a Bud Lite . The correct spelling of this beer is Bud Light.

“Am I being overly sensitive? Perhaps, but one of the pleasures of my job is defending the honor and reputation of one of the nation’s most admired companies: Anheuser-Busch.”

Unfortunately, Cooley did not send me a case of Bud Light, but of course I cannot expect to be rewarded for my mistakes.

*

Cooley did not mention that one of Anheuser-Busch’s competitors, Miller Brewing Co., does indeed call its product Miller Lite . Anyone who ever watches football games on television (and that certainly includes me) should know that. But I imagine Miller is taboo in Cooley’s vocabulary.

Reader Don Way of Culver City sent me graphic proof of my error--a Budweiser bottle cap clearly stamped Bud Light .

In calling its product Bud Light, by the way, Anheuser-Busch has commendably avoided the tendency by manufacturers to give their products’ names simplified spellings-- U for you , tru for true , E-Z for easy and lite for light , for example.

I don’t know whether they do this just to be cute or to protect their products from imitation. If you call your beer lite, perhaps no other beer can use that trade name.

I am not as perturbed by simplified spelling in advertising as by the pretentious identities given some products.

A car is a car, as every schoolchild knows. But car is not good enough for the car marketed by BMW. They call theirs “the ultimate driving machine.” So the BMW is not only not a car, it is something above and beyond a car. In fact, the ultimate.

The phenomenon that annoys me most, however, is that motion pictures are not simply motion pictures anymore; they are not even movies, even though that is what most of us have called them most of our lives. They are now known as “motion picture events.”

I wonder why it is thought that calling a movie an event will give it more stature. Inevitably, this form of exaggeration has been taken up by other producers. Barbra Streisand’s recent concert was an event, not a concert. (It was quite a concert, by the way. You might even call it an event.) But a movie is a movie--even “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List.”

By the way, in calling my error egregious, I think Cooley was exaggerating. Egregious means “glaring, flagrant, notorious.” I think the error was just careless, or at the worst, ignorant.

As for whether or not I should include Bud Lite among my errors for 1994, indeed I must. I never try to dodge responsibility for any mistakes, whether of grammar or fact. As far as I know, Bud Lite is the only mistake I’ve made this year. If indeed I have made others, happily I have forgotten them.

I think that’s a pretty good record--not to say an event.

I think I’ll just open up a bottle of Miller Light and toast myself.