A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a political, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. The word slogan is derived from slogorn which was an Anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm tanmay (sluagh "army", "host" + gairm "cry"). Slogans vary from the written and the visual to the chanted and the vulgar. Their simple rhetorical nature usually leaves little room for detail, and a chanted slogan may serve more as social expression of unified purpose, than as communication to an intended audience.
Marketing slogans are often called taglines in the United States or straplines in the U.K. Europeans use the terms baselines, signatures, claims or pay-offs.
Famous quotes containing the word slogan:
“There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Moreover, the slogan “highbrows and lowbrows, unite!”, which he had spouted already, is all wrong since true highbrows are highbrows because they do not unite.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“So-called “austerity,” the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. “Pull in your belt” is a slogan closely related to “gird up your loins,” or the guns-butter metaphor.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)