Baconalia?

You may have heard that Denny's is launching some fancy bacon-related promotion of foods with bacon in them. If you craved a bacon sundae, Denny's now has half the answer to your problems: A bacon sundae. Whatever terminal brain disease is making you crave a bacon sundae is still yours to contend with.

What weirds me out most about this bacon extravaganza is not so much the fact that they've put a ghastly amount of bacon in a frankly irresponsible range of dishes (because I've given up on the American people's ability to think before they jam foodstuffs in their faceholes). It's the oddly classical name.

I'd love to see the pie chart (mmmm, pie) that shows what constituents of the "Denny's demographic" (or perhaps the "Dennygraphic" ... or maybe, "Fat Racists") think of when they hear the term Baconalia. Because that's what Denny's is calling this meaty madness.

It's a clear reference to Bachanalia - the ritualistic madness that seized devotees of Bacchus/Dionysus, and I just don't imagine a ton of Denny's eaters catching that. I don't mean that (entirely) as a harsh on folks who eat at Denny's but even among my friends who are over-educated pointy-head sorts, I'm not sure more than 50-60% would immediately get the reference.

I like to imagine some thwarted comp. lit. major sulking during an ad meeting. When the campaign manager winds up the meeting by asking, "Great, we've got the bacon sundae all squared away, what're we gonna call this thing?" our hero snorts quietly, almost to himself, "baconalia?"

And then Joe Manager replies, "sounds good," and a weirdly classical name is born for an ad campaign that makes literally no other reference to Pan, Bacchus, Dionysus or any other element of Greek or Roman mythology.