August 25, 2008: "Land of Columbus"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
IMMUNIS COLUMBIA has been one of my favorite numismatic legends since I was about 7, so it was only natural that I would find a way to work this into a CRO ad eventually. And that eventually turned out to be today.

And, in this ad, nothing clever seemed really necessary – just a literal translation of a mysterious Latinate legend into direct and straightforward (and cool sounding, IMO) English, making clear what the original coiners intended.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
At first we considered making this into a political statement with "THE LEGEND MEANS AMERICA FREE FROM TAX OR TRIBUTE. THEN AS NOW, IT WAS POLITICS AS USUAL.", but we quickly realized this was a terrible idea.

We then decided to go with just the translation, but tried too hard to make sure that the reader would understand exactly what we meant with "IMMUNIS = FREE FROM TAX OR TRIBUTE; COLUMBIA = THE LAND OF COLUMBUS (I.E. AMERICA)."

This seemed awfully complicated, leading us to the simpler version in the final ad.