"Style Cream": what is it? [closed]
On this matter I have read other questions: “Sour cream” versus “soured cream”, “shaving cream” vs. “shave cream”. But, can someone explain what is the "Style Cream" to which this potato chips are associated to, as it seems to be from reading the following phrase on the packet:
American / Style Cream & Onion / Flavour
I have searched for "Style Cream" in Wikipedia, but I haven't found anything.
Solution 1:
I think what you have here is a problem of line-breaks. These crisps are American Style, Cream & Onion flavour. "Style" should be on the same line as "American".
Solution 2:
This is a combination of bad layout and ambiguous punctuation.
The phrase is meant to be parsed as "(sour, by implication) cream and onion in the American style". Because the adjectival phrase "American style" is broken across two lines, miscapitalized, and does not have a hyphen in the adjectival phrase, the implication by layout is that "style", to use a programming term, binds more tightly than the full phrase, leading to the false conclusion that "style cream" is something that exists. This should have been laid out as
American-style
Cream and Onion
Flavour
to ensure that the phrase wasn't misinterpreted. Note the hyphen and lower-case "s" in style, which says "this is a single adjectival phrase, to be parsed as a unit".
American Style
Cream and Onion
Flavour
would have communicated the intended meaning, despite being ambiguously punctuated, because the layout implies the association of "American" and "Style" instead of "Style" and "Cream".
I'd guess this was the original layout, and someone tweaked the font size up, causing "Style" to move to the next line; the tweaker, not knowing the English rules for adjectival phrases, decided to move "style" to the second line because it was "looked nicer" (one word on top, one on the bottom). The little "new" flag was probably also an unconscious impetus to break the line after "American", as it crowds the first line a little.
To be completely accurate, this should have been
American-Style
Sour Cream and Onion
Flavour
There, that's thoroughly over-analyzed.