Pepsi has a billboard up in my state reading, “Hey Washington, more people prefer the taste of Pepsi!” Clearly, the fallacy here is “ad POPulum.”

Did you catch the other ‘fallacy’? The sentence… isn’t. It does not express a complete thought. “More people”? More people than WHAT? More people than horses? More people than frogs? More people than….what? If you have a “more”, you must have a “than”. No one will prove Pepsi guilty of false advertising. They didn’t say anything. It’s very much like the deceptive, “Compare at $9.99!” It’s a non-sentence, but it fools the majority.

Mark G. van der Hoek