Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Easy Jet Verbal Humor in Berlin

The large European budget airline, EasyJet, has a hub in Berlin and a reputation for humorous advertisements.

I remember a couple years ago I was here, and EasyJet had a bold heading, "We can fly you to 85 cities from Berlin" - and a much smaller subtitle and warning, "But they're all pretty boring compared to here."

In May 2018, I noticed new Wortwitz (word wit) posters for EasyJet, as below.




Du kannst es dir urlauben (literally, You can vacation yourself) is a close twist on Du kannst es dir erlauben (You can allow yourself) - a one letter vowel change.



Erholung means recreation.  Erholung is das A und O = Recreation is the A and O.   This plays on "It's the alpha and omega" meaning first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, it's the A to Z. 

But here, you also need to recognize the A is a Swedish A with a little circle on top and the O has a classic Swedish slash.   So it's not the alpha and the omega, but a call-out to vacation choices in Sweden.