Letters

Cultural Universals Are Lost in the Translation
Regarding Simon Anholt’s book Another One Bites the Grass, the one thing he never gets around to is “making sense of international advertising” [Adweek, Oct. 4]. Perhaps that’s in the parts not excerpted, the parts we’re supposed to buy.
He tells us what we can’t do to understand other cultures. We can’t speak the language well enough. We can’t live there long enough. And even if we could, we still wouldn’t understand foreigners because “individuals each have their own culture, too.”