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Thursday, July 1, 2021

Ads - Part 6

NOVA mobile phone

This commercial for the NOVA mobile phone aired in Iceland in November, 2020.  It featured naked people of all shapes and sizes – men, women, young, old, fat, thin.  I edited out most of the women, since this is The Unashamed Male, not The Unashamed Female, though some women remain in mixed-gender scenes.  The original commercial was twice as long.

You'd never see a commercial like this in America.   Why are we so ashamed of our bodies?  As this commercial illustrates so well, young or old, fat or thin, there's nothing to be ashamed of.

Fun fact: the Icelandic alphabet contains extra letters, as you can see in the words at the end of the commercial.  The letter þ (thorn) is pronounced "th", and the letter ð (eth) is also pronounced "th".  These letters used to exist in Old English, but they were dropped from English in the late Middle Ages.

3 comments:

Paul said...

Great commercial - I need a new phone, maybe I’ll tell them I say this ad! BTW Icelandic also has the letter æ, which Old English also had. It was the French scribes after the conquest of William the Bastard in 1066 who couldn’t cope with those ancient letters that changed the two runic letters to “th” and the æ (ash) to e.

whkattk said...

Very cool commercial. We don't allow nudity in the U.S. because too many people can't separate "nude" from "sex."

Anonymous said...

Fun fact: Assiniboine uses the same letters. Basically other Sioux dialects use S and Z, but because those sounds are dental in Assiniboine, you get Þ and Ð to separate þi (foot) from ði (yellow) from thi (to inhabit, pronounced with an aspirated T).