Say i...

iS iT just me or has the world gone iMad? Any word that is preceded by a lower case ‘i’ seems iMmediately to be surrounded by perceived designer sexiness, a gravitas that is in most cases undeserved, and an iNflated price tag. Of course it’s all the result of the iPhone, iPod, iPad frenzy that we have all been living with for a number of years. iCake, iFriend, iKitten, iHome, the list goes on. It seems that everything and anything can be ‘oomphed!’ with the simple addition of an ‘i’. What is it all about? There’s even a company called iEverything who sell… well, everything that is ‘i’.

Of course it’s just a marketing tool, a fad that will soon drop out of sight, a buzzword. That will eventually buzz off. Back in the eighties everything was labelled ‘Turbo’. You could buy Turbo Mops, Turbo Ghetto Blasters, even Turbo Beer. Following that the ‘in’ term was ‘injection’, also defined and shortened to an ‘i’, but this time after the word and not in front of it. Who can forget the XR3i (a car in case you’ve forgotten)? Which was at least understandable because the ‘i’ stood for injection which was something to do with fuel delivery I think. But it didn’t end there. I remember buying both a vacuum cleaner (HV2i) and a microwave (MVSi) that were also graced with an ‘i’ after their product number. What type of injection did they possess I wonder? Tetanus?

For a while it was all ‘R Us’. I guess it started with ‘Toys R Us’. But it was soon followed by ‘Phones R Us’. ‘Pizzas R Us’, ‘Tiles R Us’, ‘Bakers R Us’, there was even a surgery called ‘Doctors R Us’ (pronounced Ducters Er Uz) in Birmingham - where else?

Of course, for a short time everything was dot com (as in .com) and companies raced to change their livery, and in some cases rename their companies, to the all encompassing and very trendy ‘.com’. I remember the first time I passed an Iceland store just after they’d relabelled. It struck me odd at the time that a company selling frozen food should be so keen to be a .com company. Eventually though, as we all know, that particular .com bubble burst and companies rushed to disassociate themselves from the dot label.

What’s next once the iThing has lost its hutzpah I wonder? There’s always something trending, the next big thing, the latest fad, craze, gimmick (as it used to be called in the swinging/dodgy sixties). Maybe, with online enabled implants just around the corner, it will be not an ‘i’, but an eye. A real one.