Word: edsels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Edsel Ford was a cultured man, a collector and an arts benefactor, in a town and time where culture equaled "pie-eating contest." He supported expeditions to the polar ice caps. His philanthropic legacy lives on in the Ford Foundation...
Fifty years on, the name Edsel remains shorthand for hubris and collapse, a mal mot of capitalism, right up there with New Coke, Betamax and Pets.com Except that Edsel was a real person and a pretty good one at that. On this, the anniversary of his maligning, it feels like somebody ought...
...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...