Oh, this is rich: Johnny Carson’s former sidekick, Ed McMahon — whom Johnny often teased about his appetite for distilled beverages — has lent his name to a new brand of vodka, McMahon Perfect. Even the name just shouts out for one last jibe from the grave, doesn’t it? Quick, somebody call Jennifer Love Hewitt and see if she can contact Johnny on the other side!

Seriously, I find I rather like the smooth, old-fashioned ad copy over at the brand’s official Web site; it’s like something from Ed and Johnny’s early days on television. I can just imagine an urbane man in a dark suit and skinny tie — a young Ed himself, perhaps — seated in a leather wing chair and gesturing with a smoldering Chesterfield as he expounds on the quality of the item he’s selling. It was a different kind of selling then, one simultaneously more sophisticated and more innocent than the slick, calculated ads that we get today. It appealed to the intellect and taste of the viewer, rather than the visceral and emotional; it was about convincing you, not bashing you over the head or making you feel inadequately cool for not already owning the product. Of course, commercials were just as full of crap then as they are now, but the style was different… quieter.

Anyway, getting back to Ed’s current endeavor, the ad copy is quite nice, all except for one glaring error that stands out like a flare to my overly developed powers of grammatical observation. Perhaps you’ll notice it, too:

…McMahon Perfect is distilled using a special four time-filtration process that allows for strict quality control.

Do you see it? Let me give you a hint: it’s all about the hyphen, baby. Four time-filtration process. Now what does that mean, exactly? That the company use four time-filtration processes, whatever they may be? Or did the copy writer really mean a four-time filtration process, i.e., the booze gets filtered four times? I suspect the latter, as, I imagine, most readers would. But because of one suspiciously placed hyphen, the entire phrase is rendered vague and uncertain.

This is the kind of nit-picky thing I spend my days thinking about. Which means I’ll probably be ready for a good stiff shot of McMahon Perfect by the time I get home tonight. Not that it’s available in my home state, of course. Stupid Utah…