Word: forde
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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...
...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...
...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...
...Ford execs decided to trash all the highfalutin marketing research, overrule the family and honor their fallen president. Quel dommage...
...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...