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[xela]

I'm grabbing a bite at WFM to wait out rush hour. Hendrix just came on the sound system & I found myself imagining a time traveller taking him by the lapels: "Dude, if you don't get your shit together, in 40 years when one of your songs comes on, the first thing people are going to think of will be 'drowned in a pool of his own vomit - how pathetic.'. Don't be the poster-boy for drug addiction, man. You're better than that."

And then another part of my brain butts in with "Poster-boy? Would that be a locution that made sense to him, in, what, 1968?"

I'm not even sure I was conscious of the time-travel fantasy til pedant-me intervened....

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Comments

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

There were *literal* poster boys at that time - the Muscular Dystrophy Association fund-raising folks started putting kids on posters (or in magazine ads) in the 1950s, as far as I can tell. I haven't taken the time to look up when it became more of a metaphor meaning the most famous case of a medical problem (or whatever).

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I think my time-traveler is safe, then: Even if the only common usage was literal, the metaphor is one you can expect an intelligent person to catch onto immediately. And all else aside,Hendrix was a sharp guy.

I was thinking as I was writing it about saying something like "the first poster-boys I know of were Jerry Lewis' annual MD telethon kids. Which I think I first saw in maybe 1974, and I think he'd been doing that for a long time already then...." But an advantage of posting from my iPhone is that it encourages brevity, And if I reported all the rat-holes my brain darts down, I'd do nothing but post all day. :)

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

"If I reported..."
Isn't that what Twitter is for?