{"id":12580,"date":"2009-12-15T10:10:38","date_gmt":"2009-12-15T18:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2009\/12\/15\/island-of-misfit-toys.html"},"modified":"2009-12-15T10:10:38","modified_gmt":"2009-12-15T18:10:38","slug":"island-of-misfit-toys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2009\/12\/15\/island-of-misfit-toys\/","title":{"rendered":"island of misfit toys"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I don't think I had ever heard of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer_(TV_special)#The_Island_of_Misfit_Toys\">Island of Misfit Toys<\/a> before a couple of months ago, when it figured prominently in an anti-iPhone <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=O30bXECD36I\">Verizon commercial<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Which would normally be more a matter of my lack of pop-culture knowledge than something relevant to words or language. Except that the phrase seems to be suddenly becoming a popular metaphor.<\/p>\n<p>I saw it in two different news stories during one week a couple weeks ago. I didn't record the first, but the second is a <cite>New York Times<\/cite> article, \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/11\/30\/business\/media\/30carr.html\">The Fall and Rise of Media<\/a>,\" which says (about job loss in traditional media) \"That carnage has left behind an island of misfit toys.\"<\/p>\n<p>It's possible this has always been used as a metaphor, ever since the <cite>Rudolph<\/cite> TV special was broadcast in 1964, and I just didn't notice it until I had a referent to pin it to. But I see that a direct-to-video movie, <cite><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer_and_the_Island_of_Misfit_Toys\">Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys<\/a><\/cite>, was released in 2001, and has been aired annually on ABC since December of 2006, so I'm speculating that that's led to increased awareness of the Island. I don't have time to track the phrase further, but I suspect use of the metaphor has gone way up in the past three years.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t think I had ever heard of the Island of Misfit Toys before a couple of months ago, when it figured prominently in an anti-iPhone Verizon commercial. Which would&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphors","category-specific-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}