Do you ever wonder who coined certain turns of phrase?
Take “smile and dial,” for example, which refers to the practice of cranking out phone calls in some sales-frenzy fashion.
I’ve got to believe that expression emerged some time in the last century, most likely in the last 50 years and certainly post-1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. (Just what do you suspect was its rhyming precursor, anyhow…`knock and stalk’?)
Here’s a phrase that you likely have never heard or seen–at least, I find no reference to it in a Google search: “flail and email.” That’s what I call the electronic mail variation on the smile-‘n’-dial theme, as I noted yesterday in my Chicago Marketing & PR column for Examiner.com.
No need to flail about in order to see the context of the piece, which is headlined “Don’t Just `Flail & Email’–Ensure Your Media Targets Are `Eligible Receivers.'”
