Origin of Term
Beginning in 1946, for marketing purposes the coast from Fort Walton Beach to Panama City was called the "Playground of the Gulfcoast", as witnessed by the name of the Fort Walton Beach newspaper, the Playground News, later the Playground Daily News, now the Northwest Florida Daily News. In 1952, this particular stretch of coast was dubbed the "Miracle Strip" by Claude Jenkins, a local journalist, a term which is still reflected in the name of the Miracle Strip Amusement Park and other local businesses.
According to the Daily News, the term Emerald Coast was coined in 1983 by a junior high school student, Andrew Dier, who won $50 in the contest for a new area slogan. Since then, the term has been expanded by popular usage to cover all of the northwest coast of Florida from Pensacola Beach to Panama City Beach. Since most of the region's visitors have historically been from other parts of the South (in contrast to Gold Coast beaches at the lower end of the Florida peninsua), since the 1980's a disparaging term for the area has been the "Redneck Riviera," which is sometimes considered to stretch as far west as Gulf Shores, Alabama.
Read more about this topic: Emerald Coast
Famous quotes containing the words origin of, origin and/or term:
“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed,—a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Dead drunk
is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or a foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)