People Hate to Diet, Marketers Respond

Stuart Elliot, writing in the New York Times, tells us to get ready for a new set of vocabulary for diet soft drinks. It seems marketers are reacting to people's sense that the word diet connotes some sort of punishment, bad taste and wimpy image for men. While Pepsi coined the term "free" at one point in the 80's for its caffeine free drinks, other marketers are set to replace "diet" with "free" and "zero." If one time traveled 100 years into the future one wonders how one would communicate when the combination of marketing and political correctness had so altered language as to render it incomprehensible to the traveler.