Once, at the beginning of a radio newscast, I had to read a brief ad for the sponsor, a brand of orange juice. According to the ad, this brand was "the best-tasting orange juice, naturally!" According to the parenthetical instructions in the copy, "naturally!" was to be "said with the implication, 'Is there anything else?'" I did my best to put every ounce of feeling I had into "naturally," so I'd like to believe I guilted those coffee, tea, soda, water, and non-orange juice-drinking scoundrels into guzzling this orange juice as they listened to the news.
Those parenthetical instructions would have sounded even more bizarre if I'd applied them to a sentence I once announced in some voice-over copy. For several years, I was one of the main voices of an information-by-phone service. Each week, I would record a multitude of events-around-town listings. The most offbeat sentence I ever had to announce was, "The artist's work is an amalgamation of gourds and seed pods." Although putting gourds and seed pods together is honest work, I still think if I'd added "naturally!" to the end of that sentence, it would have sounded even more eccentric. I missed an opportunity, alas.
