Label Puzzler: Original Recipe AND New Flavor?
[W]hile the box is closed, the ice cream inside exists in a quantum superposition of states in which it is both “original recipe” and “new flavor,” and only when the box is opened and the ice cream observed does the wave function collapse into either an “original” or “new” state. Alternatively, the two states would decohere and two new universes would form, in one of which you are eating original-recipe ice cream and in the other a parallel You is enjoying the new flavor. (I don’t think there’s any scenario in which a cat spontaneously forms. Please!)
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Please let me know if you are interested in serving as an expert witness for a possible quantum-physics defense to consumer-law claims involving allegedly self-contradictory labels.
I’ll do this one pro bono. A new flavor has to be the original recipe. No quantum mechanics involved. People think of original recipe as meaning a throwback (especially since the New Coke debacle), but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s only a contradiction if you know it’s not redundant. No label superposition. It would be neat to have entangled flavors, though, like one half-gallon of chocolate and one of vanilla, but you don’t know which is which until you open one of the containers.
When someone writes an original work, it is usually something new. In fact, that’s almost the definition. It just sounds like someone was being clever. If nothing else, they were original.
Actually, not really, when someone writes an original works, it means the work doesn’t exist anywhere else.
It could be an old original work.
Yes, there is more than one meaning of “original,” but in the context of an advertising claim, I think we have to read it as meaning “our original [i.e., first or oldest] recipe.” (The way KFC uses it.) The other definition would mean that the advertiser was emphasizing that the recipe was “original” with them and not copied from somebody else, which would be a good copyright defense but doesn’t seem like a very good selling point.
Under that view, the two statements do necessarily contradict each other, so that my Quantum Ice Cream Theory (Sherbet Uncertainty Principle?) would come into play.
I also like your Flavor Entanglement Postulate. Wish I had originated that.