Free over the air television in the
United States is advertiser supported.
During the United States NCAA
National Basketball Tournament (we call it “March Madness”), the television
viewership numbers are enormous. As a result, companies pay large sums of money
to run 30 second commercials for their products during the broadcasts. The link
below is one of the commercials: for AT&T, American Telephone and Telegraph.
At every game during the
tournament, vendors gather to sell memorabilia relating to the participating
college teams: hats, caps, shirts, jerseys, sweatsuits, flags, banners,
magazines, figurines, toys, and other doodads. Doodads, that is a good slang
word meaning little ephemeral items that your children will insist that they
must have but which they will discard, break, or lose as soon as they get home. In the South, we also call
them doohickeys or whatchamacallits. Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doodad
defines doodad as “an often small article whose common name is unknown
or forgotten: gadget.”
In the commercial in the link below, the vendor is obviously trying to avoid the cost of paying royalty licensing fees to the universities. He is selling counterfeit items. His main problem is that his counterfeits are glaringly obvious. The university names are spelled incorrectly, or the colors on the items are not the colors associated with the university. His counterfeits include: Unsee instead of UNC (The University of North Carolina), Gonzaza instead of Gonzaga University, Markett instead of Marquette University, Oregano instead of The University of Oregon, and Dook instead of Duke University.
Not all counterfeits are as obvious as these and, sadly, they also occur in spiritual matters. There are spiritual counterfeits which have arisen from well-intentioned ignorance and stupidity, or from peculiar mis-readings of the biblical texts, or from secular concerns being forced into the scriptural interpretation (eisegesis).
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