i Took a ‘flier’

When I was trying to make graphics (a logo, etc.) for this site, I added Adobe Express to my Adobe (“Creative Cloud”) account. There’s a month-long free trial, so I took advantage of that.

Adobe Express has templates for all kinds of images – business cards, logos, newsletters, fliers, standard graphics, and others I can’t think of right now. They can be used wholly or partially to make needed images. It's really finicky, but a lot of fun to play with.

A few days ago, I was looking for something I could work with and then post to Instagram. I started thinking about fliers (rather than more of the lifeless images I had been posting), and that got me thinking about the word “flier” (USA; “Flyer” outside of the United States).

This caused a long detour where I had to figure out how to get a new library card via the Internet (rather than flying to America and walking into an actual library) so that I could create a free Oxford English Dictionary account. (Without a free account, the OED is painfully expensive!) It took a long time, but it worked. And here’s what I found:

fli·er [FLY-er] (I'm American....)
Origin: 1874-1889; presumably derived from fly + -er
noun
A handbill, fly-sheet; single-page document, typically (if not always) an advertisement.

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I thought fliers (office-paper-size advertisements, typically) got their name because, if thrown, they’d be carried by the wind – ie, they’d fly away. But the word may come from printing: pages were (maybe still are) moved via the metal fingers of printing machines, which push the pages forward – called flyer-fingers.

Regardless of its origin, the word seems to have come directly from fly-sheet, the name for those irritating advertisements that fly out of magazines or newspapers. Similar to these stupid things (which I’ve only ever heard called “subscription cards”, but perhaps these are more specific, and more modern):

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