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Seven Is Tops. The word "slogan," from the Gaelic sluagh (army) and gairm (a call), originally meant a call to arms—and some of history's most stirring slogans, from "Erin go bragh" to "Remember Pearl Harbor" have been just that. In peacetime, argues Hayakawa, electorates respond more readily to slogans that promise change, since people are rarely satisfied with things as they are. One notable exception was the catch phrase that helped return Britain's Tory Party to power in 1959: "You never had it so good." In general, though, Democrats, like detergent manufacturers, favor slogans that offer a new and better product ("New Deal," "New Frontier"). The Grand Old Party, like whisky distillers, prefers to emphasize aged-in-the-wood reliability, from Abraham Lincoln's "Don't swap horses in the middle of the stream" to 1924's "Keep cool with Coolidge."
To be fully effective, say psychologists, a slogan should express a single idea in seven words or less. "It is a psychological fact," says Harvard's Gordon Allport, "that seven is the normal limit of rote memory." (Example: telephone numbers.) Whether plugging cat food or a candidate, sloganeers lean heavily on such verbal devices as alliteration ("Korea, Communism, Corruption"), rhyme ("All the way with L.B.J."), or a combination of both ("Tippecanoe and Tyler Too").* Other familiar standbys are paradox ("We have nothing to fear but fear itself"), metaphor ("Just the kiss of the hops"), metonymy ("The full dinner pail"), parody (a Norwegian travel folder promises "a Fjord in Your Future"), and punning ("Every litter bit helps"). By using what semanticists call "affective" language, many slogans deliberately exploit chauvinism ("Made in Texas by Texans"), xenophobia ("Yankee go home"), insecurity ("Even your best friends won't tell you"), narcissism ("Next to myself I like B.V.D. best"), escapism ("I dreamed I barged down the Nile in my Maidenform bra").
Long before Poet T. S. Eliot expounded his theory of the "auditory imagination," Pioneer Adman Earnest Elmo Calkins used pocket poetry to make "Phoebe Snow" glamorize passenger service on the coal-burning Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. Slogans nearly always overload the language and often debase it ("cof-fee-er coffee"). English teachers curse Madison Avenue for institutionalizing bad grammar with such calculated lapses as "us Tareyton smokers" and "like a cigarette should." By contrast, some of history's most enduring slogans were plucked from literature. Winston Churchill's call to "blood, sweat and tears"—boiled down from his first statement as Prime Minister in 1940, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat"—was adapted from a passage in a 1931 book by Churchill; but strikingly similar words were used in previous centuries by the British poets John Donne, Byron and Lord Alfred Douglas.