December 3, 2007: "UH-RIJ-UH-NAL-I-TEE"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We wanted to highlight the fact that this coin was so utterly, completely and thoroughly original that it literally defined the concept – and what better way to communicate that than to use the lame ‘Dictionary Definition’ approach most often seen in high school book reports?

Exactly.

But somehow it seemed to work.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We had a couple of other unrelated ideas for this one, including: "Disgustingly original, offensively eye-appealing." but we figured a high percentage of CW readers would simply think we were crazy.

Then there was "Originality, they name is CRO.", but that seemed extremely pretentious (in addition to being another ‘high-risk-of-being-misunderstood’ concept).

Compared to those, the dictionary definition approach was a home run, which required only that we find a dictionary with a definition that sounded pretty good (you’d be surprised how much variance there is from one to another). Fortunately, my wife the English major has about a dozen dictionaries, and we settled on Merriam-Websters.