New York, Your Second Home, My Ahhhh... Whaddya, Whaddya

According to The New York Times (via Gothamist), New York City has filed an application to trademark the phrase, "The World's Second Home."

Gothamist asks -- could this possibly be the worst marketing slogan of all time?

Answer -- very probably, yes.

You can almost smell the desperation of the marketers -- late at night, at the fifteenth brainstorm, with the research clanking around the table, after the focus groups have turned up nothing at all...

Defenders of the phrase say there's some sort of tourist logic here -- as in, they think of us that way.  Which is nice, up to a point.

Immediate reactions of a native, however:

A) We ain't second to anything.

B) This means that my friends and relatives are now officially sanctioned, and I'll never get to deflate the air mattress in the living room.

C) You want to capture who we are?  Try this -- we're America.  The real America.  Not the big out-west wide-open-spaces thing that everybody talks about -- I mean we're the American ideal.  Millions of us, from all kinds of backgrounds, living on top of each other and mostly not liking each other but managing not to kill each other, and mostly succeeding.  That, guys, is Civilization.

How about getting that on a tourist poster, why don't ya?

By the way, if you're thinking that this particular native New Yorker needs a vacation, you're right.  Expect one next week.

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