Recently, not a week has gone by without the national television station uncovering another case of advertising fraud: Two weeks ago, it was some kind of tea that claimed to be a secret Tibetan concoction with weight-loss potency. This week, a wok advertised as non-stick and non-smoky was found to be just a regular cooking utensil with none of the purported functions.

I wonder why people take delight in such exposes. If product safety officials had done their job, reporters with little knowledge of product technicality would not have these scoops.

Unlike last year's flurry of cases, this year's were meant to rob not to kill you. When I talk to some entrepreneurs not in the capacity of a reporter, of course, I often get the refrain that it's okay to exaggerate the power of your product as long as it does not poison the consumer.

Think about it. This is their ethical bottom-line. It is a great leap forward from those that would do anything for a buck. As one woman who splurged a few hundred yuan on the "Tibetan tea" complained to China Central Television (CCTV), "the money was nothing, but I thought I could shed a few pounds and I was swindled!"

It was the psychological damage rather than monetary loss that gave her grief.

In a sense, consumers like her had it coming. Chinese people have always had a penchant for elixirs that can cure everything. In the old days when quacks sold their potions at flea markets, they literally put up notices that emphasized the "one hundred illnesses" they could heal. When I was a kid, I would tease them by naming strange symptoms they failed to include on the list. They would shoot back: "Sure, this herb is the best for that! Didn't I tell you it's guaranteed to treat a hundred diseases? A hundred in Chinese means every one. You dummy!"

We are brought up in a culture of hyperbole. We used to shout the emperor would live ten thousand years, even though it was inflated a hundred times for the best possible scenario of current life expectancy. But nobody seemed to mind.

Likewise, we pick similarly florid words for denunciation. Saying someone "deserves a thousand stabs and ten thousand cuts" may sound like a grueling scene from a horror flick, but it's no more emphatic than "deserving to die", sometimes even in taunting. I remember a Chinese student in New York had a spat with his friend and hurled words to this effect. He was arrested and charged with attempted murder when the police got a verbatim translation of his threat.

Such figures of speech permeate our lives. In school, we were promised a beautiful world where everything we ever needed would magically fall into our lap. It was not called "utopia". Maybe kids, or the kid in us, need these kinds of soothing fairy tales to transport us into a fantasy land of perfect harmony.

The course of growing up is, in a way, the process of learning to strip away the pretensions from the essence. Nowadays, cynics begin to turn the clichs on their heads. For example, "famous" is so overused that anyone with a whiff of name or position would crown himself a "famous" something. Along came comedian Guo Degang, who labeled himself "non-famous" and became an overnight sensation.

Then, Guo, like other celebrities, went into overdrive to cash in on his popularity. For a reported two million yuan, he appeared in ad campaigns for the above-mentioned brand of "Tibetan tea"; but he tried to maintain his "otherness" by refusing to appear on the CCTV Spring Festival gala, an overblown show with caricatured expressions of joy.

Suffice it to say, it's not easy to be nimble in the midst of landmines of fancy words and trite metaphors.

Email: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn