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

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Based on extracted text and snippets the backronym may have been
mentioned during a set of interviews in 1976. I have not checked this
information on paper (or full scans) so it may be wrong. I looked in
JSTOR, and I do not think that this journal is in the JSTOR database.

Journal: Southwest Folklore
Volumes: 4-5
Quote Page: 79
Publisher: Arizona Friends of Folklore, Flagstaff, Arizona
(Google Books snippet view; data may be inaccurate)

[Being extracted text]
This transition stage is further evidenced by the 1976 interviewees'
experimentation with the names of brand-name items by means of a
remarkable complex and sophisticated use of acronyms:

(17) Pony shoes became Piss on New York;
(18) Puma shoes became Piss under my ass;
(19) Adidas shoes became All day I dream about sex.
[End extracted text]


JSTOR has the following article title in 1984, but there was no match
for Adidas in the text according to the search engine. The allusion
might still be present, of course:

All Day I Dream about Sex
W. P. Osborn
Mississippi Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Fall, 1984), pp. 106-116


The following 1989 article in JSTOR mentioned the initialism "All Day
I Dream About Sex" for Adidas but did not give a date.

Rewriting Initialisms: Folk Derivations and Linguistic Riddles
Nicholas Howe
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 102, No. 404 (Apr. - Jun.,
1989), pp. 171-182

Garson

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 7:32 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Adidas -- All Day I dream about . . . (UNCLASSIFIED)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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>
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