Could that be you? Would you relish the opportunity to work with some very important and powerful bloggers and politico/media types?

We’re obviously a flourishing media operation with trillions of dedicated readers per day so it’ll be easy for you to sell a highly educated and web-savvy audience to advertisers.

We’ll offer a generous commissioned sales package to start with serious opportunity for growth. You’ll offer a great sense of humor (must be fluent in LOLcat) with real world ability to deliver the goods – AKA you’ll be able to force some old codgers who don’t have a clue how to spend ad dollars to spend their ad dollars on the internets and teevee.

Send your cover letter (yes, it’s required, don’t accidentally “forget” to include it, and MAKE IT FUNNY!), a resume that makes sense and 3-5 strong references to Jake. We promise not to tell your current employer that you’re job shopping.

Remember, kids, it’s all about the $$$$. We have it, you want it. So let’s play together!

With the deadline approaching Sept. 1, customers hoping to cash in on the chain’s five-for-one frequent burrito buyer deal have about two weeks left.

With a Qdoba card, customers who buy five entrees earn one free entree — a rate twice as fast as usual. The special deal began July 7 as a response to the area’s high gas prices as a way to help families feeling the pinch at the pump.

“We wanted to find a way to help people in Kentuckiana who are fed up with rising gas prices,” says Lauren Carpenter, marketing director of ZT of Louisville, LLC., which owns 23 Qdoba restaurants in three states. “Giving them a free meal more quickly allows diners to get a lot more for their money this summer.”

Try the Ancho Chile BBQ burrito. Gooood.

OK – can anyone in Louisville or the immediate vicinity (or anywhere at all for that matter) tell me what the latest advertising campaign from Fischer’s, the Smile Makin’ people, with the bratwurst and the “Das Gut” slogan is all about?

Consider this a rant from me, Mr. Language Man.

I normally try to keep my tirades at a minimum, but one of my pet peeves involves the faulty use of foreign words or phrases in English. Especially when it comes to food. For example, don’t say “salsa sauce,” because salsa already means sauce in Spanish. Given the overriding and obnoxious degree of monolingualism that prevails in this country, I should be happy that Americans even make the attempt to incorporate new and exotic words from international lexica in their vocabulary, but the hackles on my language-teacher neck nonetheless rise whenever a company or some other entity in a position to ensure the accuracy of their verbiage falls short of the mark.

I sort of understand when Mötley Crüe incorporates the umlaut (i.e. the two cute little dots over the o and the u) but do they not know that the incorporation of the charming little dots technically changes the pronunciation of the name of the L.A. glamband to something more akin to Mertley Cree-uu? (I tried to incorporate an actual transcription of the symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet to facilitate pronunciation, but Microsoft Word started hacking up a hairball on me, so my crude guide to saying the word correctly will have to do.)By the same token, do the people at Kellogg’s ®, the makers of Müeslix ® cereal, understand at all that the umlaut employed in the name of their granola breakfast treat can also be transcribed as an e in conjunction with the letter it would normally crown? In short, ü can also be written as ue. And ö can be written conversely as oe, and the ä, as ae. So, Kellog ®’s people, choose one or the other, please! Is it Müslix or is it Mueslix?

(Now, I should clarify: I’m assuming that all these corrupters of the noble umlaut have adopted the usage of the suspended snake eyes as prescribed by the German alphabet, primarily due to the prevalence of Teutonic-inspired lingo in this country. When people see it, 99 percent of the time, this vowel sound changer is used in German words. If, in the very off chance, Mötley Crüe or Müeslix has derived linguistic inspiration from one of the other languages that utilize cute little dots over their vowels, I’d say they’ve got even more of a phonetic mouthful to contend with. But, I could be wrong.)

Cutsie-pie symbols aside, business people need to exercise more care when venturing into unknown linguistic territories in search of entire foreign words for eye-and-ear-catching advertising fodder. (We’ll save infamous examples of American advertising strategy run amok in foreign countries for a later blog.)

Of course, it’s no big deal, in the grand scheme of all things karmic, to make a language blunder, but if you’re a company with the resources to pay people to do your advertising and marketing, you don’t have much excuse – in my book at least – for not getting it right. (But then again, if you actually hired people, maybe they made a mistake. Or else they were perfectly aware of, or unconcerned with, their linguistic transgressions and decided to forfeit accuracy in lieu of something that nonetheless conveyed a sense of das foreign and das exotic in hopes of enticing das buying public. At least in the Fischer’s add, they did utilize the somewhat appealing iron-cross script to convey a sense of das Old World. Nothing wrong with that.)

That’s why I almost crashed my car the other day as I sped down the highway, neck craned to see if I had correctly read the huge Fischer’s advertisement flying by. Next to a huge and delicious bratwurst were the words “Das Gut.”

OK, what’s that supposed to mean?

I’ve lived in German-speaking countries and I can’t figure it out, so what are the poor and under-traveled amongst us fortunate globetrotters supposed to make of it then? Most Americans can figure out that “das” is “that” in German, and that “gut” is “good,” but what the heck is it supposed to mean when we see them together? “That good” maybe? Is it perhaps exclamatory? i.e. Fischer’s bratwurst: It’s that good! No. That would be “…so gut” in German.

“Das ist gut,” meaning “that is good,” would work, but something would be missing in the Fischer’s original. Perhaps they forgot the verb?

Or else they might have forgotten an ending on the word “Gut,” which, due to the capital G, suggests they are trying to make a noun from an adjective to say something like “Fischer’s – the good one!” In that case, the translation should have read: “Das Gute”

Other than that, I’m at a loss to explain the rationale behind this billboard, other than the fact that the bacon-makin’ people were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of that segment of the Kentuckiana sausage-eating public that hasn’t ventured to master the tormented tongue the great American bard Mark Twain called “that awful German language.”

I suspect that this is a rather sizeable portion of the local population, but still. For the few hundred (Dare I aspire to hope: few thousand?) people in the metro area who speed by the billboard on any given day and take offense at the lackadaisical linguistics behind Fischer’s latest advertising ploy, it would have been balm to our battered Teutonic psyches to enjoy a larger-than-life example of correct German in use. It might have even brought us one step closer to world peace. But, alas . . .

Now, I must admit, I haven’t taken into consideration that the mastermind behind the billboard consulted a Swiss hillbilly in the Alpine hinterland who speaks a rare dialect of deconstructed high-Palatinate German when designing this floating-in-the-air advertisement, so if that’ the case, pardon me. For now, I can only come up with one term that adequately sums up the overall impression the sign makes upon them what knows: faux Deutsch.

And, as if to torment me even further, as I sit here blogging, with the television set radiating me with a comforting murmur in the background, a Fischer’s commercial for the now notorious brat comes on! And what does the decent-looking bloke on the screen exclaim after he tucks into his perfectly grilled sausage? “Mmmm. Das gut!” Does the poor guy realize he sounds like a caveman in German?

Das Gut? Das Dumm!!!

I asked my boss, a native of Deutschland, at Bellarmine University, where I teach German, what she made of the sign, and she was “puzzled” to say the least. Let me tell you, you don’t find too many puzzled Germans out there. They tend to know it all and they will tell you as much, so if she can’t make hide nor hair of it, I suspect the sign makes no sense. Her husband, Jim, aside from myriad astute comments about the generally high number of morons in this country, offered an intriguing proposition: Perhaps the sausage-crafting, would-be linguists at Fischer’s wanted to say “Das gut,” using the German word for “the” and the English word for “gut.” That is, “the gut” in English, a possible reference to what the eaters of one-too-many bratwursts will wind up with in the beer-bellied end. I tend to disagree with this cynical, albeit perceptive, analysis because American consumers couldn’t be that dumb.

Could they?

All the other German-speakers I’ve consulted have just shaken their heads and seem to think otherwise.

Me? I’m just curious. Bacon-makin’ people: Enlighten me! What does your billboard mean? Am I missing something?

And just answer me one last question as I put my laptop to sleep and wander off to a land of fretful slumber plagued by nightmares of errant double dots wreaking havoc on the linguistic landscape of my mind: When you laid out your advertising budget, which I’m sure included tens of thousands of dollars for the roadside billboard, did you think to spend an extra hundred dollars to hire a foreign language expert to help you perfect your linguistic endeavors? I commend you for trying, but there are professionals out there who do that sort of thing for a living. They’re called translators. Surely someone in your marketing department had the bright idea to do a little fact checking, nicht?

I’m sure your brats are wonderful and all, but the next time you’re tempted to sprechen a little deutsch, have someone proof the language first. We in Germania, though small in number, will salute you for it.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of mimicking McDonald’s healthful food options is just plain funny.

No, I’m not going to launch into some Morgan Spurlock tirade against the Golden Arches and its not-even-close-to-nutritious food. Ronald’s food is what it is: indulgence grub, something you should enjoy occasionally … if you really like that stuff.

No matter how much marketing McDonald’s does, I’m permanently programmed never to think of its products as good for me. I don’t ever foresee the day when my internal organs begin sharing the digested components of a Big Mac and begin humming, “I’m lovin’ it.” For me, the song typically is a different and more ominous one, “You’ll pay for this!”

So Yum! wants to emulate this? Fine. I understand the need to make money, the shareholders’ collective lash ever snapping at the backs of the board and demanding profits.

But let’s be honest about this, fellas, we don’t need a Yum! version of McDonald’s. Go ahead and open up for breakfast and serve breakfast pizzas at the Hut, chicken biscuits at KFC and breakfast burritos at Taco Hell. That would be original and it likely would drive sales.

Give us something new, not recycled.