Sneakers get red hot
“The very language of tody’s advertisements is charged with sexuality. Products in the more innocent fifties were “new and improved,” but everything in the eighties is “hot!”—as in “hot woman,” or sexual heat. Cars are “hot.” Movies are “hot.” An ad for Valvoline pulses to the rhythm of a “heat wave, burning in my car.” Sneakers get red hot in a magazine ad for Travel Fox athletic shoes in which we see male and female figures, clad only in Travel Fox shoes, apparently in the act of copulation—an ad that earned one of Adweek’s annual “badvertising” awards for shoddy advertising.”
—Jack Solomon, from The Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, 1990.
“If you were a car . . .”
“‘If you were a car, what kind of car would you be?’ As a candy-red Porsche speeds along a rain-slick forest road, the ad’s voice-over describes all the specifications you’d want to have if you were a sports car. ‘If you were a car,’ the commercial concludes, ‘you’d be a Porsche.’”
—Jack Solomon, from The Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, 1990.
a cathedral of ice
“[Albert] Speer’s most impressive architectural accomplishment was probably his stage-management of the 1934 Nuremurg Rally, for which most of Goering’s stock of searchlighs was brought to the Zeppelin Field:
‘The hundred and thirty sharply defined beams, placed around the field at intervals of forty feet, were visible to a height of twenty to twenty-five thousand feet. . . . The feeling was of a vast room, with the beams serving as mighty pillars of infinitely high outer walls. Now and then a cloud moved through this wreath of lights, bringing an element of surrealistic surprise to the mirage. . . . The effect . . . was like being in a cathedral of ice.’”
—Bill Risebero, The Story of Western Architecture, 1979. The source of the quote within is unstated.
real white sheets
“ZABEL: My dream?
JEAN: Dream on your feet and you’ll fall down. . . .
ZABEL: My dream is to sleep just one night between real white sheets. One on top, and another one under me.”
—from the subtitles of Port of Shadows, Le Quai des brumes, directed by Marcel Carn’, 1938.
Dress in rose color
“Dress in rose color and say little.”
—Benozzo Gozzoli, The Journey of the Magi; Cosimo de’ Medici’s advice to a friend on a mission to another city. As quoted in Leonardo, by Robert Payne, 1978.
in all his finery
“Only the Florentines and the Venetians could dress like popinjays without looking ridiculous. And although Leonardo [da Vinci] wrote somewhat contemptuously abut the absurd and wonderful fashions of his time, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that on occasion he dressed up in all his finery, like any dandy. That he favored rose color, which was reserved for the nobility, suggests that he regarded himself as belonging to the nobility, by descent from his mother’s side.”
—Robert Payne, from Leonardo, 1978.
the ethnic term “black”
“A . . . significant example of language turnover can be seen in the sudden shift of meaning associated with the ethnic term “black.” For years, dark-skinned Americans regarded the term as racist. Liberal whites dutifully taught their children to use the term “Negro” and to capitalize the “N.” Shortly after Stokely Carmichael proclaimed the doctrine of Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966, however, “black” became a term of pride among both blacks and whites in the movement for racial justice. Caught off guard, liberal whites went through a period of confusion, uncertain as to whether to use Negro or black. Black was quickly legitimated when the mass media adopted the new meaning. Within a few months, black was “in,” Negro “out.”
—Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.
Every architect wants his own shade of green
“There are ten times the new styles and colors there were a decade ago. Every architect wants his own shade of green.”
—John A. Saunders, president of General Fireproofing Company, an office supply manufacturer, as quoted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, 1970.
old-line “white shoe” firms
“Wall Street was, in fact, one big White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subcult, and its members did tend to go to the same schools, join the same clubs, engage in the same sports (tennis, golf and squash), attend the same churches (Presbyterian and Episcopalian), and vote for the same party (Republican). . . .
In investment banking the old conservative WASP grouping still lingers on. There are still some old-line “white shoe” firms of which it is said ‘They’ll have a black partner before they hire a Jew.’”
—Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.
a corporate merger
“Out of . . . two sources, the beat subcult of the mid-fifties and the “acid” subcult of the early sixties, sprang a larger group—a new subcult that might be described as a corporate merger of the two: the hippie movement. Blending the blue jeans of the beats with the beads and bangles of the acid crowd, the hippies became the newest and most hotly publicized subcult on the American scene.”
—Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.