Newsflash! Coffee drinkers pay more better attention!!

Everybody knows that in-flight magazines are fluff and filler ... but in the current Hemispheres magazine, this little number really took the cake:

BUZZ WORDS
Caffeine gives readers a lift

Does the sentence “Did the marketing department sent the memo?” look OK to you? If so, a team of Tufts University researchers recommends that you get yourself to a Starbucks, stat. In a recent study, the team asked groups of people to consume different amounts of caffeine, then compared how often they caught common writing errors, from the simple (misspellings) to the complex (subject-verb disagreements, incorrect tenses). While no amount of caffeine helped the subjects spell better, drinking a few cups of coffee did help them find the more complicated subject and verb errors. [...]

Really? Coffee helps people to pay better attention? Who'da thunk?

Here's what I really want to know: first, what funding agency paid for this research; and second, if it was anybody other than a coffee-industry funded booster organization, were the staff in charge of writing checks withdrawing from caffeine at the time they approved the expenditure?

Sheesh...

Maybe I'm the sucker. I'm the one who picked the magazine out of the seat pocket in front of me.

What's the most vacuous filler you've ever read in an in-flight magazine?




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Words matter?
Starbucks' vacuum-packed greenwashing
Drafting vs. editing



Thanks to capl@washjeff.edu for le café crème.