O-Rama-O-Rama

Erica and I passed a shop on while garage sailing last Saturday whose name ended in -o-rama. We speculated on where the ending -o-rama originated. It has a retro feel to it. I said it sounded like it was from the 1910 or 1920 era, while Erica thought it a 1950s thing. After 20 seconds of Googling I found this:

Horama is Greek for ‘sight’, coming from horan which means ‘to see.’ The suffix -orama as in panorama, diorama and cyclorama comes from the Greek. Bill Bryson, in Made in America, explains that Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939 is what inspired later compounds using the variation -o-rama. This exhibit was immensely popular and showed what the world was supposed to be like in 25 years (1964). Futurama is merely the application of English -orama to future — literally ‘vision of the future’.

So, Bagel-O-Rama is a Vision of Bagels.

O-Rama-O-Rama is a vision of visions.

I have pictures of my Dad at the 1939 Worlds Fair standing on line at Futurama.

One Comment

  1. envaneo wrote:

    On the first Saturday from 1-4pm on the legeslature grounds we have our annual Halloween-0-Rama. I’ts our own fundrasing event. Families can buy tickets throufh us or sponsor hospital kids etc to come out. Everything is under circus tents. There’s street performers, petting zoons costume contests and free hot chocolate and candy for the kids. It’s not open to the public and you need a ticket to get in but it’s the only O-Rama here that I can think of.

    We also have Dollarama. It’s a dollar stor across the street. If there’s no school bus in the way, I’ll try and post a pic before I go in and put it up on my Blog for you.

    Jim

    Tuesday, February 5, 2008 at 3:48 pm | Permalink