Cause Marketing

The ad at the left is for a pair of yoga pants. When you buy them from Lucy.com , an unspecified donation is made to Off the Mat, Into the World , a nonprofit co-founded by the model in the ad, Seane Corn. The ad ran in the magazine Yoga Journal in May 2010. ‘Off the Mat’ is a fun name, suggesting that there’s other things in life that reward the participant in addition to yoga. So what does Off the Mat do? The ad says OTM’s mission is “inspiring conscious, sustainable community service through the power of yoga.” I know what community service is and I understand the words conscious and sustainable in a broad way. But when they’re all combined in that sentence it seems like nonsense. It’s hard to imagine unconscious community service, for instance. In this sentence it’s as though plain English got tied up like a pretzel. I suspect that for many of the readers of Yoga Journal words like conscious and sustainable used in this way represent a cant or argot . That is, a phraseology or i...