enticing

I am smart enough to realise there was something wrong with this, but dumb enough it took me a long time to figure it out. It is of course the language that twists the idea of 'one of a kind' from being 'the only one of its kind' to 'one purchasable element of many constituting a "kind" of item'. Wow.

Real estate advertising - like all advertising - is one of those things you can't sit down and argue with; it just is, is stupid, is clever, is canny, is deceptive. In this case, the fact that one of the monopolyesque houses is blue appears to be sufficient to set it apart (in at least one reading of this graphic) from all the others which are curiously set in a circle backing onto each other (great arrangement, unfortunately the house on which this ad was placed was just another dreary late 19th century North Melbourne terrace on a dreary mid-19th century grid, though yes, I am sure the back windows of the actual home do look straight into someone's kitchen and someone's bedroom and vice-versa). If anyone does buy into the North Melbourne real estate dream where prices start, I gather, above the half a million mark, then I hope they are making some calculations a little above the level of 'what a darling little blue home', but the agent's research must have revealed that the darling little blue home has a poignant gut-level meaning.

Meanwhile on the topic of real estate I found this very funny.