December 15, 2008: "Holy Moly"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We wanted to find a way to emphasize the fact that this Washington Silver Urn Funeral Medal (unlike any other we’ve ever seen, or know about, with the exception of one which appeared in a 1921 auction) does not have a big hole in it at 12 o’clock on the obverse for suspension.

And that makes it an excessively rare and, in our opinion, extremely cool piece which nicely exhibits the design as the original makers intended.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We struggled quite a bit with the "Holy Moly!" part, first making sure we spelled it right, then wondering if we should intentionally spell it wrong (as in Holey, a play on the unholed concept), but that left us wondering if that would mean we had to spell Moly wrong as Moley, and the whole thing got very confusing.

Which led to an extremely ill-conceived exploration of the use of "Un-holey Moley!" to emphasize the unholed idea, but no matter how you spell it unholey has an extremely negative connotation we didn’t want any part of.

So we went back to "Holy Moly", with a tiny detour through "Holy Mackeral!" via "Holy Toledo!". Since the caption was almost too long to fit into the ad this week, and because we though it read best as one line, we really had no choice but to go with the shortest version.