When avoidance is wrong

I'm usually very reluctant to play Grammar Cop¹, but I thought I'd try the badge on just this once...



I was reading The Healthy Home: 31 Ways to Protect Yourselves from Toxins, by Therese J. Borchard at World of Psychology (March 6, 2011), and one particular listed item caught my eye as being very oddly phrased...

11. Avoid aerosol products that have non-spray alternatives. If you must use aerosols, open a window and run your bathroom fan. Wash products off your face as soon as you get home instead of waiting until bedtime. A few additional chemical-free hours each day could add up to more than six years over a lifetime.²

Does anyone else see it, or is it just me?

To be fair, I believe it's quite obvious exactly what the author(s)³ meant, but what was written in that first line seems to me to be almost the exact opposite of the intent. "Avoid aerosol products that have non-spray alternatives" tells me that if an aerosol product is also available in a same-branded non-aerosol version, then I should AVOID BOTH of those products of that brand in favor of a differently branded, but similar product offered ONLY as an aerosol. Then I'd be, in effect, punishing the makers of a product for offering it in two different forms while rewarding the maker of the aerosol-only version.

As a further minor quibble, I could also take issue with the phrase "non-spray alternatives." It is obviously being used as a synonym for "non-aerosol", but that is simply not valid. All aerosol products may be sprayable, but not all sprayable products are aerosols.

It seems to me that a much better wording would have been something like: "Use aerosol products only if there are no readily available, similarly effective, non-aerosol alternatives." The key is to concentrate more on telling folks what to actually use instead of just what to avoid using which, to my way of reading it, introduces a certain amount of ambiguity.

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¹ ...Because if you do it even once, you then expose yourself to all sorts of potential future "Aha!" moments of retribution and I've never been one to expose myself in public.

^2a Note that I considered emphasizing the specific questionable part of the quote in boldface, but decided against it so as not to call too much obvious attention to it... just to better test if anyone else would notice the same oddity as I did on first-read. I included the full quote of the numbered item for complete context.

^2b Also, and of least importance, I'm assuming the line "Wash products off your face as soon as you get home instead of waiting until bedtime" is most likely (or at least most generally) addressing women in the conventional workplace, specifically with regard to the use of facial cosmetics.

³ I cannot be sure if the quoted bit is a paraphrase by Ms. Borchard or if it is being cited verbatim from the book under discussion, which is authored by Dr. Myron Wentz (father) and Dave Wentz (son), also with Donna K. Wallace.