![\"O2](\"https:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/O2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nShall we begin with a little Latin? If you’ve been watching\u00a0<\/b>O2’s hilarious ‘be more dog<\/a>‘ ads or sat at one of the 10,000,000 bus stops in London\u00a0you will now know that the timeless rallying cry\u00a0Carpe Diem<\/em>\u00a0has hit the streets. And, once you’ve had a hoot at the cat-that-turns-into-a-dog footage, you’ll have learnt that\u00a0Carpe Diem<\/em>\u00a0means\u2026 \u00a0‘Grab the Frisbee’. \u00a0I somehow think that Horace, who wrote the words c. 50 BC, would have agreed it was not too bad a translation for 2013 AD. I love the idea that some Latin is out there and available to all, a call to make the most of it, to\u00a0seize the day!<\/p>\n So make a noise for\u00a0VCCP<\/a>, the agency who dreamt the whole campaign up; \u00a0as an ex\u00a0JWT<\/a>\u00a0exec myself , I am impressed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And now to Japanese. How many of you think that the\u00a0Superdry<\/a>\u00a0clothing brand, with its cool hoodies, tops and t-shirts plastered with Kanji and Hiragana, comes from Japan? Sorry to disappoint, but Superdry has its origins not in an office in downtown Tokyo, but in a market stall in Cheltenham, where a guy called Julian Dunkerton began selling branded clothing and later had the idea to use Japanese script on his clothing. And the rest, as they say, is history – Julian is now the Chief Exec of one of the UK’s top clothing companies.<\/p>\n It may be reassuring to know that although the company itself is no more Japanese than a benko box from Pret, I am told that the writing is not gobbledygook but does actually mean something: which I am sure is neither unprintable, nor deeply philosophical, but I rather like the idea of millions of people in London walking around with Japanese on their backs – and their fronts.<\/p>\n Of course I am not attempting to connect any of this to a serious attempt to learn a language – though the thought of people queuing up to take degrees in Classics and Japanese is a most appealing one.<\/p>\n However, \u00a0I’m sure that most of us have at least some interest in the world around us, and iconic branding and imagery can often excite our curiosity, make us think a bit and have us see the world in a slightly new and refreshing way.<\/p>\n Steve<\/p>\n (Photo courtesy of Superdry.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I quite like the way that the iconography of \u00a0foreign languages and exotic scripts happily manages to pervade \u00a0our popular culture. It’s all over the place – it’s on the streets, we wear it , we eat it, we watch it and much of the time we have a laugh. And we have a bunch … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[103,3],"tags":[279,280,281,124,52,227,101],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n