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

[Laurence Horn]

On Apr 11, 2014, at 3:45 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:

> 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

Well, Adidas comes off (as it were) better than Puma, anyway.

LH
>
>>> 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." "
>>>
>
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