Adidas -- All Day I dream about . . . (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Ben Zimmer]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 2:53 PM, Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net> wrote:
>
> I heard this from my cousin back in 1979 or 1980, when we visited them at their
> lake house in North Carolina. He held up his Adidas t-shirt for me and said it. I
> also posted about it here a few years ago when the subject of backronyms came
> up, but can't easily search for it right now.

That squares with my own childhood memory. And here it is in a 1980 or
1981 issue of _Southwest Folklore_:

http://books.google.com/books?id=zbMnAQAAIAAJ&q=adidas

--bgz

>> On Apr 11, 2014, at 1:40 PM, "Mullins, Bill CIV (US)" wrote:
>>
>> Barry Popik recently posted on the backronym:  Adidas = All Day I Dream About Sex/Soccer/Sports, taking it back to 1993.
>> http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/all_day_i_dream_about_sports/
>>
>> From Newsbank:
>>
>> The Dallas Morning News - Tuesday, April 28, 1987 p 1b
>>
>> "To me, it's better to win and hurt a little, than lose and hurt a lot,' says Crenshaw, who has written 'all day I dream about state' vertically from each letter in the word Adidas on his cleats."
>>
>>
>> St. Petersburg Times - Tuesday, August 23, 1988 p 4
>>
>> " "It seems like I've always loved soccer," she said.  When she was 8 years old, Tina wrote a letter to adidas telling the company just how much. She wrote a letter using each of the letters to spell out a message: "All Day I Dream About Soccer." "
>>
>> USA TODAY - Tuesday, May 16, 1989 p 1d
>> " For instance, everywhere he goes, he asks kids if they know a double meaning for the sneaker name Adidas - and everywhere he goes, the kids know it means "All day I dream about sex." "
>>

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