![]() By that fall, the joke had become so widespread that a Canadian sporting goods store used the acronym to announce that it was now carrying Adidas products. After this, instances of “what does Adidas stand for” seemed to become much more popular, as more examples of “all day I dream about sex” appeared in other newspapers. One man said it was “all day I dream about sex,” and another person thought “all day I dream about sports” made more sense and, apparently, this conversation was interesting enough for columnist Art Carey to relay it in a newspaper. The next-oldest instance I found was from May 1981, when a columnist in The Philadelphia Enquirer related a story from a party where people were debating what Adidas really stood for. 1 warmup suit is Adidas - a word that, a nine-year-old girl confided the other day, stands for ‘All day I dream about sex.’ Nine!” The nine-year-old girl Caen was referring to is likely a joke or something that’s entirely lost to history, but Caen was a popular, nationally-syndicated columnist, so it makes sense that he at least popularized the rumor of what Adidas “really” stood for. As for that 1978 instance, it came about from popular San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen, who, on March 10, 1978, wrote, “As you joggers and jigglers know, the No. The earliest instance I could find of one was from 1978 - some 30 years after the name originated - but these jokes likely started earlier, in the halls of middle schools in the early-to-mid 1970s and perhaps even before. “Adidas,” however, would prove to be such a curious collection of letters that bogus acronyms would eventually be formed around it. He combined his nickname - “Adi” - with the first three letters of his last name. Later on, the “Dassler Brothers Sports Shoe Factory” would supply sports shoes to the Hitler youth and German olympians, but after World War II, Dassler had to find a new, Nazi-free image. Adolf Dassler was a German shoemaker who began a business repairing shoes in post-World War I Germany. Though “all day I dream about sex,” “all day I dream about sports” and “all day I dream about soccer” have all been attributed to Adidas, the origins of the brand name actually link back to the name of the company’s founder. ![]() So, in an attempt to better understand that “Gary Busey” part of our brains, here are a few of the most common made-up brand backronyms, and what I could find out about their origin… Adidas: ‘All Day I Dream About Sex’ People particularly seem to like to do it with brand names, especially when brands don’t use an established word as their namesake. Guys like Busey, Dwight Schrute and many American politicians might seem better tapped into the part of the human brain where backronyms are formed, but word games like this aren’t at all uncommon. My favorite example of a backronym, though, was in The Office, when Dwight engineered one out of his name in preparation for a performance review. You find this kind of thing in legislation a lot of the time - like the PATRIOT Act, for example - or, if you’ve heard Gary Busey talk at all over the last 20 years, he was probably making up a backronym out of someone’s name or some random word. While not recognized as a “ real word ” by several of the big dictionaries, a backronym - as I prefer to spell it - is when people reverse-engineer an acronym out of a preexisting word. Technically, the name for this kind of thing isn’t an acronym, it’s a “ backronym ” (or “bacronym”). ![]() I can’t remember if I actually believed him or not, but it wasn’t until years later that I found out Adidas actually stood for “All Day I Dream About Soccer” - and it wasn’t until years later still I found out that acronym was also bullshit. Most of the Nikes all blended together over the years, but I distinctly remember a pair of white Adidas I got as an early teen - not because they were especially cool or comfortable or anything like that, but because I recall a fellow middle-schooler telling me what exactly those six letters meant: “All Day I Dream About Sex.” ![]() Generally they were Nikes, but every now and again, another brand would have the right price tag and my mom would buy those instead. As a kid, the sneakers I usually got were ones found in the clearance section of a nearby outlet mall. ![]()
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