Word: carred
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Edsel was one of the cruelest tributes ever paid a man. Named after Henry Ford's son and the longtime company president--who died at age 49 in 1943--the Edsel was not just a car but a whole division within Ford, created to compete head-to-head with General Motors' Oldsmobile. It was a sales disaster. Two years later, future Ford president Robert McNamara persuaded the board to pull the plug on the Edsel. That's the same McNamara who became President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and refused to recommend withdrawing from Vietnam, even though he knew...
...national punch line. It was such an easy target that even the widely unloved Richard Nixon could get off a zinger. The Vice President was riding in a convertible Edsel in Lima, Peru, in 1958 when his motorcade was pelted with eggs. "They were throwing eggs at the car, not me," Nixon later quipped...
...Ford family opposed calling the new car Edsel. This was only a few years after Edsel had died, and his son, Henry Ford II--also known as the Deuce--thought it was undignified to have his dad's name spinning around on hubcaps. Ford execs commissioned extensive semantic studies to find a name for the project, even going so far as to solicit suggestions from the poet Marianne Moore, who offered, among others, Mongoose Civique, Intelligent Whale and Utopian Turtletop. Clearly, naming a car wasn't as easy as it seemed...
...name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers," wrote Marshall McLuhan, and in Edsel Ford's case, never really means never. As soon as it became clear that the car wasn't selling, company researchers fanned out to discover why. One theory blamed the name itself, with its unpleasant homophonic associations with diesel and dead cell (as in batteries). It just wasn't a pretty word, though it seems to have served Mr. Ford well enough...
...propose we rehabilitate the name. Fifty years from now, Edsel--derived from the Old German Adal, meaning "noble"--should bring to mind not the failed car but the decent man whose legacy fell under the huge chrome wheels of consumer culture on its first reckless laps...