Yesterday, I wrote a post about the town slogan for the opening town in the second-generation Pokémon games, Pokémon Gold and Silver, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of their release in North America. There, I made a case for viewing the slogan – “The Town Where Winds of a New Beginning Blow” – in the context of the experience of the children who played the original games before moving on to Gold and Silver. In this post, I will briefly note how the town slogan inspired-in-part my idea for the slogan for The New Leaf Journal.
Similarities Aside, Our Name Did Not Come From Animal Crossing
In a recent Guestbook entry which resulted in an article response by Victor, a reader noted that he had found our site when searching for Animal Crossing money-making tips. Whether he was being serious or just making a joke, it is true that the name of our site bears a partial resemblance to the Nintendo 3DS Animal Crossing entry, “Animal Crossing: New Leaf.” This is not something I was unaware of, for I played and enjoyed New Leaf, and I convinced Victor to try it too (he has since far surpassed my Animal Crossing passion).
However, with the resemblance noted, I will say definitively that the name for this site was in no way inspired by Animal Crossing. If anything, I had some minor concerns that Animal Crossing’s association with “New Leaf” would hurt our ability to build a search engine standing, but by the time we were ready to launch The New Leaf Journal, the newer and even more popular “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” was about ready to be released. I covered our misadventures in that game in May, and Victor offered an unusual money-making strategy in response to the Guestbook post.
We cycled through many name ideas before settling on The New Leaf Journal as a good name for an online magazine devoted to generally fresh content instead of content in a specific area. Most importantly, appropriate domain names for the site name were available. To the extent that I did borrow an idea from Animal Crossing, it was to turn “The Emu” section of the site into The Emu Café. To be sure, the café aesthetic complements the grand idea of The Emu section, but I also did think back to the charming pigeon-run café in some of the earlier Animal Crossing entries.
Finding Inspiration For Our Site Slogan in New Bark Town
While Animal Crossing did not serve as inspiration for the name of The New Leaf Journal, I did draw inspiration for part of our name from the town slogan for Pokémon Gold’s and Silver’s New Bark Town. As I explained in my previous article, the slogan “The Town Where Winds of a New Beginning Blow” betrays a good sense of aesthetics, both in what it evokes visually and what it conveys symbolically. This is true even beyond my belief that the slogan had even greater meaning in the context of the real life experiences of children who had played the first-generation Pokémon games before tackling Gold and Silver. I have always appreciated the elegance of the theme – having noted in my earlier post that I used it in my final article for my high school newspaper.
To be sure, we were not going to merely lift a slogan from Pokémon for The New Leaf Journal. Leaving the obvious reasons unstated, New Bark Town’s slogan would not perfectly apply to The New Leaf Journal project. While The New Leaf Journal is a new endeavor, I am not sure that it is a new beginning, per se. Instead, I focused on finding a slogan that fit our particular project – one that expressed our goal in creating content while fitting in with our site name and aesthetic.
The True Story Behind The New Leaf Journal Slogan
When the launch of our provisional site was fast approaching, I scoured quotes and other materials forideas for our site slogan. In The Century Dictionary, I found a wonderful usage example for the word “viridity,” quoted from John Evelyn’s “Sylva”:
This deification of their trees amongst other things, besides their age and perennial viridity…”
John Evelyn, “Sylva”
Because this is not a Pagan website, I had no interest in using the Mr. Evelyn’s quote in its entirety. But I did like the “perennial viridity” usage quite a bit and thought that it described our goal in creating content for The New Leaf Journal. With the central line down, I borrowed from the New Bark Town slogan in incorporating the “perennial viridity” idea into The New Leaf Journal. As a result, our original slogan was born:
Where the leaves evince their perennial viridity
Original slogan for The New Leaf Journal
That remained our slogan for a short while. However, after working to optimize parts of our site for search engines and display elsewhere, I discovered that our slogan was a bit longer than what is preferred. With no saving construction to make a suitably short slogan with “perennial viridity,” I used a modified version of the phrase for our second, and current, site slogan:
Where the leaves are perennially virid
Current slogan of The New Leaf Journal
Although our slogan changed, the inspiration of New Bark Town’s slogan lives on in our second site slogan. The New Leaf Journal is the place “where the leaves are perennially virid.” While “virid” does refer to the color green, strictly speaking, our slogan actually uses the term more in the sense of freshness, for we here at The New Leaf Journal appreciate the different characteristics of all the seasons, including those leaves that incline from green to yellow to brown as the temperature changes.
Final Thoughts Amongst the Changing Leaves
Since my previous article was about my views on the town theme for New Bark Town in the context of the Pokémon series and those who played the first two generations of games, I thought that it would be altogether fitting and proper to note the small influence that the very slogan had on our slogan here at The New Leaf Journal. In this confession, I hope you have a better idea of why we chose the site name and tagline that we did, and how it ties into the kind of content that we hope to produce going forward. As Victor has noted in the past, it is not always easy to convey our understanding of the project to others. This article is, in part, my small contribution to that larger project.