The word “droid” is short for “android.” When you think of androids you think of robots. “Robot” is a Czech word that means “drudgery.” “Drudgery” is defined as “dull, irksome, and fatiguing work.” And let me tell you: it is dull, irksome, and fatiguing to sit through this latest Verizon Droid commercial.

The ad, which just started airing on TV, takes aim at the iPhone, calling it, among other things, “digitally clueless.” The implication is that the Droid, well, isn’t. It’s fast, and ludicrously so (“a racehorse duct-taped to a scud missile); it knows its way around the Web (“like a circular saw through a ripe banana”); and it’s built not to look pretty, but to do.

To do what? I don’t know, it just “does.” Or as they say in the Spanish commercials I see on Fox Sports en Español and GolTV, “Droid hace.”

Attack ads are weird. You know how in politics, politicians will always claim to run a clean campaign with no negative ads, but then that promise is broken as soon as their poll numbers turn south? And then how people always tell pollsters that negative/attack ads don’t affect them, yet when exit pollsters ask them the same question they’re all, “Well, my guy said the other guy hates puppies, so…” That’s what’s going on here: Verizon is trying to knock the Apple off its little perch. Maybe it’ll work?

(Apple isn’t “above” running attack ads, either. You’ll recall the long-running “Mac vs. PC” ads, yes?)

Who would have thought, years ago, that we’d be seeing “my phone is better than your phone” commercials on TV?

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