Someone has called advertising the art of deception.

I'm not ready to go that far. But one of the most obvious attempts at deception - you can see right through it, or better yet, you can hear right through it - is one that happens almost every night as soon as you sit down to eat.

The phone rings. You answer the phone and hear the tell-tale back ground noise that telegraphs some boiler-room operation. Then after a two-second delay a voice finally comes on and identifies himself as Roger or Jeffrey or Susan or some other common Anglo-sounding name.

The voice, however, has that lilting, musical rise and fall to it that clearly indicates the speaker's native language is one of the dialects of India or southeast Asia. Immediately your ear knows that while this voice might be claiming to be Rog…