Wrestling Newspeak

5 comments

A couple of days ago I was eating lunch with my mother at Cedar's Eatery. One of her friends came over and sat with us and somehow professional wrestling came up. While telling his story, this man (who is in his fifties) naturally referred to the WWE or World Wrestling Entertainment.

The branding switch from the old WWF to the WWE, following the World Wildlife Fund's court case, has to be one of the greatest examples of George Orwell's 'Newspeak'. It seemed overnight that professional wrestling had always been called the WWE. It wouldn't surprise me to watch SummerSlam 1984 and discover all of the banners have been airbrushed with the new initials. Spooky.

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Mark -

True indeed Daniel. How 'bout the Americans support for Iraq. I don't think the ministry of information likes this new fangled web thing.

Al O'Neill -

http://theimmortalsco-opt.blogspot.com/

Ouch, this turned political awfully quick, didn't it?

On the subject of wrestling, the way the history books would be erased and re-written any time a wrestler defected to the WCW was very amusing. It wasn't until Ted Turner's operation started out-drawing the WWF that WWF even acknowledged the existance of any other federation. Even publishing their own magazine teh way Nintendo did in the 80's and 90's so that kids could live in a safe, monopolistic world.

It's funny how good a case study professional wrestling can be for what one can do when one controls all coverage of one's operation.

Oops, there I go getting political again.

Paul -

Incidentally, the WWF stands for World Wildlife Fund (not foundation). Also, the link you supplied for them points to a wrestling site (the Web Wrestling Forum). The WWF's website is www.wwf.org (not .com).

Ben -

http://occasionallywright.typepad.com

The funny part is that the Swiss based charity sued the American based wrestling company in a British court over the WWF initials with domain name confusion being the lynch-pin of their complaint. The wrestling people lost, changed their name, and at no point since have the animal people bought the domain name wwf.com which was supposedly confusing so many poor souls.

Also, the WWE now owns the WCW video library alowing them to revise whatever they want. My favourite part is when wrestlers say things like- 'I've wanted to be the WWE champion my whole life' even though the WWE name has only been around for a few years.

For the record Summerslam started in 1988. Macho Man and Hulk Hogan beat Andre the Giant and Ted Dibiase.

Daniel Burka -

Thanks for the editing Paul. Both name and link have been updated.

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Daniel Burka

My name is Daniel Burka. I'm a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, I'm the director of design with a startup called Tiny Speck and for several years I was the creative director at Digg. I grew up in PEI, Canada, where I was one of the founders of silverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and css selectors, I'm a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.

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I'm a web designer living in San Francisco, California. I sometimes get the chance to present lectures and workshops at conferences around the world, where I speak about iterative design strategies, designing for large online communities, and more broadly about interface design for web applications. I've posted many of the slides from past presentations I've done on Slideshare.

Currently, I'm the director of design at a small gaming startup called Tiny Speck. Until October 2009, I was the creative director at Digg. I was also one of the co-founders of the social content-sharing site Pownce, which is now a part (heh heh) of Six Apart. Back in 1999, I helped found silverorange, a stellar web development and design firm based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I continue to work with silverorange, but as an inactive partner.

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