Sometimes jokes go too far. The Wisconsin Tourism Federation, which, as Chris Matyszczyk reports, created its name “30 years ago, when the Web was not even a thought in the mind’s eye of an engineering spider” has had to change its name because some bloggers have been having fun with the acronym. The new name is the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin. It’s unfortunate they couldn’t figure out something simple with Federation at the beginning and Tourism in the middle, because then they could come up with a blog-friendly slogan like “Wisconsin tourism: FTW!” Except I’m sure they’d get bashed for that and, apparently being easily shamed, they’d change their name and their slogan, causing further confusion. Maybe we should all take a cue from P.J. O’Rourke, who, on Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me had a lot of trouble figuring out why this is a problem. He finally said “WTF probably spells something that probably means something to you people”. Yes, it does mean something, but I don’t see why it can’t also just mean Wisconsin Tourism Federation. The people who work for the WTF have a hard enough job convincing tourists to visit Wisconsin in the winter, so it’s not fair to make their lives harder.
I realize I’m helping to perpetuate the joke, but really I want to let the Wisconsin Tourism Federation keep its old name. The joke is mildly amusing so we should all take a moment to giggle once and then ignore it from now on. It’s bad enough that reporters have come up with some pretty bizarre pronunciations for the name of the planet Uranus, which has been called “the Rodney Dangerfield of planets”. Are we all so childish that a perfectly respectable organization has to change its name because the acronym is an internet joke? There was a time when I used to laugh hysterically whenever I heard the names Peter or Willy. Then I grew up. An English friend of mine told me the name Randy would cause a lot of embarrassment across the pond. Except I believe most British people would be smart enough to know that it’s a pretty normal name in the U.S. and polite enough not to mention it.
And finally I have to wonder whether Washington and Wyoming also have tourism federations. If they do I hope they have the good sense not to change their names.
