On Sales Spiels

Julia Keller, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, in a piece on the function and effect of the use of place names in fiction, opens with the following lede graf:

Salesmen have a trick. It's a well-known trick, but even though you know it's coming, it really works: They use your name over and over again in their spiel. Hearing your name operates as a sort of verbal aphrodisiac.

Oh yeah? Well, it may work that way for Ms. Keller, but for us it has a rather different effect. Whenever we're assaulted by that sales technique no matter what's being sold, a commodity or an idea, our first response is to say to the perpetrator, quietly and absent any trace of anger, (actually say, not just think of saying), "If you repeat my name just once more, I'm going to rip your tongue out of your face — through your nose!"

This has the effect of instantly throwing the pimp off his game, and the spiel — and the pimp — are gone within a matter of seconds.

Works like magic.