Recently I've become enchanted with an advertising slogan for my favorite brand of running shoes (one of the few not entirely made in slave-labor tyrannical countries ... but that's another issue). The shoebox says simply: ACHIEVE NEW BALANCE.
What a delightfully ambiguous mantra! Maybe it's merely the imperative verb "Achieve" (i.e., "Triumph" or "Just Do It"), followed by the corporate name. How dull.
But, as I much prefer, achieve new balance can also be parsed as a unified phrase — an admonition to strive for fresh stability, wholeness, enlightenment, a recentering of one's self. Ahhhhh ....
In its multiple meanings the words achieve new balance remind me of the classic linguistic textbook example "fruit flies like a banana". They also bring to mind one of my favorite riddles: What did the Sage say to the hot dog vendor? The answer appears below, written right-to-left to avoid spoiling the fun. (Or see http://www.his.com/~z/index.html#Answer0 )
gnihtyreve htiw eno em ekaM
(see also SoFunny (10 Aug 1999) and LoLa (22 May 2001) ...)
TopicRunning - TopicPersonalHistory - 2002-07-17
(correlates: DalaiLamaBirthdayGift, SoFunny, GorillaPhilosopher, ...)