Neologisms successfully spread by marketers

James callan james.callan at COMCAST.NET
Sat Oct 21 03:30:00 UTC 2006


Seattle (my hometown!) just spent $200,000 to come up with the word
"metronatural" as a tourist slogan. If early blogosphere reaction is
any guide, this word will be hooted into oblivion within weeks.

However, it started me wondering: are there examples of words coined
by marketers that successfully entered the language?

The only one that leapt to mind was Volkswagen's early '90s entry:
Fahrvergnugen, the faux-German word that means "love of driving" or
somesuch. Googling Fahrfergnugen -volkswagen -vw comes up with 19,000
hits, a respectable number, though many of those are usernames.

Have marketers ever had much more success with neologisms than that?

James Callan
http://www.neologasm.com

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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