David Gandy’s greatest asset is not his beautiful features. It’s the sense of gravity those features bestow. Just look at the picture of him below, ruminating like a man who’s discovered the assassination of his spy lover, or who’s learnt of Rome’s fall to the barbarians. His granite looks and hulking muscles aren’t the centre of attention. They’re there to support his expression, that of a man with a soul as deep as a canyon, bravely facing challenges unconscionable and foes innumerable. (Though whoever those foes are, he probably should probably put on more clothes before tackling them.)
 |
| More chiseled than the sphinx |
One of the brands that the gravitational Gandy does modelling for is Wellman, a part of Vitabiotics, a nutritional supplements company. (Vitabiotics’ other brands include Wellwoman, Wellkid and Wellbaby. Rumour has it they’ll launch Wellfoetus and Wellcodger in the autumn.) In Wellman’s adverts Gandy poses manfully next to the words ‘I’ve been taking Wellman since my twenties to support my health and hectic lifestyle.’
Or so he thinks. In a fearsome article entitled ‘Enough Is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements’, Edgar Miller et al. pointed out that ‘most supplement users’ have ‘no clear evidence of micronutrient deficiencies’. In other words, most supplement takers don’t need their supplements. Miller, a Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, observes that many of us fear our diets are insufficient because of how much unhealthy food we eat. Our fears are stoked and preyed upon by supplement companies. But eating a lot of unhealthy food doesn’t mean we’re getting too little of some nutrients, only that we’re getting too much of others. Most people, Miller asserts, get ‘completely adequate’ nutrients from their diet.
That ‘most people’ bit has got a lot of flack from other researchers. But whether most people do have a good diet or not, there does seem to be broad agreement that—absent of an unusual condition—a good diet is sufficient for good nutrition. So has Wellman really supported Gandy’s health and hectic lifestyle? My guess is only a little, occasionally. He doesn’t look like he skips leg day, and I doubt he skips beetroot day either.
But I know what you’re thinking: why’s Rob talking about the scam of the supplements industry when there’s a much more important issue at hand? You’re right, of course. There was a cunning little hendiadys in Gandy’s Wellman promo.
A hendiadys, as you know, is where you split one idea into two and insert an ‘and’ in between. Think of Macbeth’s ‘sound and fury’ (instead of ‘sounding fury’), or of Jesus’ promise to give his disciples ‘a mouth and wisdom’ (rather than ‘a wise mouth’). In the same vein, Gandy’s probably not taking Wellman to support both his ‘health and hectic lifestyle’, as if they’re two unconnected things. The two are probably more related than that, as in ‘I’ve taken Wellman to support my health despite my hectic lifestyle’ or ‘support my health because of my hectic lifestyle’. But saying things that way sounds clunky. So he’s just replaced all that explanatory material with an ‘and’. Woosh.
Gandy’s hendiadys doesn’t just make his statement briefer. In this case, at least, it also gives the sentence a stronger rhythmic flow: ‘support my health and hectic lifestyle’. And it brings out the he assonance too. The most important thing, though, is that the hendiadys gives each element equal standing. If Gandy had said ‘support my health despite my hectic lifestyle’, his hecticness would sound as if it came at the cost of his health. But by substitute in an ‘and’, the two elements sound like they naturally go together. Or, at least, they do when you’re supported by Wellman. The idea that Wellman’s very useful is probably bosh, but with Gandy’s clever verbal sleight of hand it seems a little more plausible.
No comments:
Post a Comment