Toll-free Commands

Quick quiz: how many toll-free phone numbers can you think of that contain words? The first one that comes to my mind is the old 1-800-94-JENNY for Jenny Craig, along with that delightful little jingle. I'll bet you can think of three or four - the fact that they contain words and not a random string of numbers no doubt helped you to remember them, which was likely the company's intention.

Sometimes, though, these phone numbers contain words linked together in interesting ways - some even look like commands. How do we think about the words in these phone numbers linguistically? Who is the issuer and the receiver of the command, and what purpose does it serve a company or organization to nest a command within a phone number?

Let's look at a handful of such phone numbers:

1-800-PICK-UPS (for U.P.S.)

1-800-CALL-ATT (for AT&T)

1-800-TRY-TO-STOP (Rhode Island's smoking cessation help hotline)

1-800-8-DÉJALO (same hotline, but for Spanish-speakers)

My first question is - are these, indeed, imperatives? The first three certainly look a lot like imperatives with an implied you as the subject - the standard form of imperatives in English. We could, however, view them as isolated verb phrases. The final phone number, however, is unarguably in the imperative. The Spanish verb dejar (meaning to quit), inflected for 2nd-person singular and with a direct object, lo (meaning it), as an enclitic can mean nothing other than the command Quit it. The fact that try to quit is translated into Spanish as a command leads me to interpret try to quit, and other similarly formed numbers, as commands and not isolated VP's.

Going on the assumption that these are intended as commands, we have to ask: who is issuing these commands, and to whom? These phone numbers are presented in ways such as this, from the U.P.S. website:

Call 1-800-PICK-UPS to find the Authorized Shipping Outlet nearest you.

On their website, U.P.S. is not ostensibly instructing us to pick U.P.S. by giving us this phone number. They are telling the customer essentially to use the command Pick U.P.S. as part of a key for getting in touch with the company. So the customer is really the one giving the command, but to whom? To his/her phone? Or to him/herself? Perhaps U.P.S. would like the customer, in entering these words into his/her phone, to internalize this as a command to him/herself - just as one might say to oneself Calm down! in a tense situation. Is the customer supposed to be commanding him/herself to pick U.P.S.?

This could be one reason why U.P.S. chose to nest a command in their phone number. Another reason could be that Pick U.P.S. stands as a command directed to the customer if we strip away the surrounding text:

Call 1-800-PICK-UPS to find the Authorized Shipping Outlet nearest you.

Perhaps the company hopes that the nested command stands out among the rest of the text, and that we understand it to be a command straight to us (and that we comply with it). This does not strike me as too dissimilar from parodies of subliminal advertising as seen on shows like Saturday Night Live:

Hiiii Daaad! Give me 50 dollars. How are you doing today?

It sure would be interesting to talk to whoever picked these phone numbers to try to understand how they see the function of these commands. Whatever their intentions, what an interesting place to squeeze in a little nugget of advertisement by exploiting the correspondence between numbers and letters on the phone dial.

Putting these real phone numbers aside, I'm sure we could apply the same interpretations to this little instruction: