Independent Healthcare Not Up on Star Trek Trivia
Adland has an image of a Buffalo-based Independent Health billboard which reads, You Deserve the RedShirt Treatment which, apparently, refers to the company's red shirted staff. It's a fairly innocuous headline until you realize the definition for Red Shirt, according to Wikipedia, is "A redshirt is a stock character, used frequently in science fiction but also in other genres, whose purpose is to die soon after being introduced, thus indicating the dangerous circumstances faced by the main characters. The term comes from the science fiction television series Star Trek, in which security officers wear red shirts and are often killed on missions under the aforementioned circumstances." Oops. Of course, not that many people passing this billboard would actually know that so guess it's all good.
Comments
Actually, I think the term most frequently refers to College Football. According to wikipedia:
For various reasons, some student-athletes may opt to attend only classes and practices with the team; this process is known as redshirting. The student-athlete does not use one of his or her four years of eligibility in that season. Using this mechanism, a student-athlete has up to five academic years to use the four years of eligibility, thus creating the phenomenon of "Fifth Year Seniors". However, each student-athlete has at most four years of actual competition with the varsity team.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirt_%28college_sports%29
To me it implies that potential prospects should sit on the sidelines for a year. Either way, probably a poor choice of words. It was probably meant to be a play on "the red carpet treatment." I'm not sure they are getting that across.
Nope, Steve Hall was absolutely right. The Red Shirt phrase almost always refers to the "impending dead guy" on Star Trek or any other show. I have seen the red shirt comment used on other non-scifi television shows and writings. You don't have to be a Trekker (Trekkie) to know what that term means.
I also think they were trying to infer to the Red 'Carpet' treatment.
Ever since the phrase (in its Trek context) was used (and fully explained) on Lost, it's become more widely known.
Post a comment