What you see (in the ad) is what you get

Saw this billboard advertisement for the Deccan Chronicle (DC) newspaper on
Cathedral road, on my way to work.

AD

BC

sometimes

two letters

denotes

an era

The ad, as you can see, is a play on their acronym (DC). But I fail to figure out what the newspaper has to do with either AD or BC or an era.

As I mentioned in one post earlier, calling the DC a newspaper would be an insult to actual newspapers like The Hindu, that do a great job of reporting news and educating the readers.
The DC on the other hand is for those that love to get the latest gossip on movie stars and
the likes of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears et al. Its just a tabloid, if you will.

However, this post is not about the DC's quality (or actually the lack of it). This post is about
the copy of their advertisement itself, which gives a fair indication of what you will get in the
newspaper.

I am no grammar expert, but somehow the wordings of the advertisement don't sound
correct to me. Is "sometimes two letters denotes an era" grammatically correct ?
I would think it should be "sometimes two letters denote an era".

But, even if they have it wrong, it would not come as a surprise to me because that is exactly
the way their newspaper reads - shoddy English, grammatical mistakes all over the place,
sentences that abruptly end without completion and so on. Sometimes I wonder whether they
actually have someone proof-reading the contents before it goes to press.

I would have expected them to be careful atleast while advertising. Maybe its an in-house
advertisement. I don't think a professional advertising agency would have made this mistake.

Inspite of all this, DC sales are soaring in Chennai, atleast if I am to believe their claims.
Not surprising given that they price the paper at Rs1.50 (some months ago it was only
1 Rupee). Add to it our interest in gossip, movie news and Page3 personalities. And at the
end of the month, it fetches more when you sell off the old newspapers to the recycler.

After all, we Indians love anything that is VFM (Value For Money).