A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a political, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. The word slogan is derived from slogorn which was an Anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm tanmay (sluagh "army", "host" + gairm "cry"). Slogans vary from the written and the visual to the chanted and the vulgar. Their simple rhetorical nature usually leaves little room for detail, and a chanted slogan may serve more as social expression of unified purpose, than as communication to an intended audience.
Marketing slogans are often called taglines in the United States or straplines in the U.K. Europeans use the terms baselines, signatures, claims or pay-offs.
Famous quotes containing the word slogan:
“No slogan of democracy; no battle cry of freedom is more striving then the American parent’s simple statement which all of you have heard many times: ‘I want my child to go to college.’”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Democratization is not democracy; it is a slogan for the temporary liberalization handed down from an autocrat. Glasnost is not free speech; only free speech, constitutionally guaranteed, is free speech.”
—Gail Sheehy (b. 1937)
“Moreover, the slogan “highbrows and lowbrows, unite!”, which he had spouted already, is all wrong since true highbrows are highbrows because they do not unite.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)