In 1976, New York designer Milton Glaser sat in the back seat of a taxi and arranged three capital letters and a stylized red heart into one of the most effective slogans in contemporary branding history.

The following year, the Wells Rich Greene advertising agency used the logo —or rebus, if you prefer — in a campaign to promote tourism throughout New York State. The campaign was intended to last only two months; instead, it has endured for almost half a century.

One sign of its success, besides longevity: its many offspring, imitators, and parodies. The latest spinoff, unveiled on March 20, 2023, is the work of the Partnership for New York City, a group of several hundred “preeminent business leaders and companies.”

What does it look like? Like this:

So far, I haven’t seen much [heart] for the new effort; there was a much warmer reception for the post-9/11 variation “I ❤️ NY More Than Ever,” created by Milton Glaser, in which the heart bore a small bruise. If you’re interested in the latest fuss, you can follow this gift link to comments in the New York Times that include words like “travesty,” “atrocity,” “an abomination,” and “Milton Glaser must be turning in his grave.” Or you can read this essay by T. Kent Jones, who is even more, um, forthright.

But I come neither to praise the new logo nor to bury it. Instead, I’m here to celebrate all the other ways in which the original slogan has left its mark on the culture.

It’s a verb!

There had been locale-love slogans before “I [Heart] NY.” Cole Porter published his minor-key anthem “I Love Paris” in 1953; “Virginia Is for Lovers” was introduced in 1969. The innovation of “I [Heart] NY” was replacing “love” with that plump red symbol. As sociologist and design critic James I. Bowie wrote in 2016, hearts had been used — indeed, overused — in advertising since the 19th century, but they were adornments, not lexical items. The heart in “I ❤️ NY” isn’t just a picture: it’s a verb.

And such a useful verb! In 2009, language researcher Erin O’Connor wrote:

What makes [the slogan] especially interesting is that the phrase “I heart” has come to mean “I love” in English. It’s not completely interchangeable in speech — talking about “hearting” a person is certainly strange, and you can’t say “he hearts his wife.”

Maybe not in 2009, but now? Language changes!

O’Connor continued:

But ah, semiotics! We can interpret the symbol itself as standing in for the verb “love” or we can interpret the word for the symbol as standing in for the act of love. The actual usage of “heart” for “love” is more playful. When Fran Healy sings “I heart everything about you” in Travis’ song “Big Chair”, he’s being sentimental, but maybe it’s coy: it’s not clear if he means the same thing as if he said “I love everything about you”.

In 2011, the online Oxford English Dictionary acknowledged this development by registering a new sense of heart (verb): “to love; to be fond of.” Surprise, surprise: The dictionary’s earliest citation for this novel usage is a peevish complaint about “the annoying use of a stylized little red heart in place of the word ‘love’ — as in ‘I (heart) New York.’” Remember: We’re predisposed to hate new names, slogans, and designs — anything new, really.

It’s an emoji!

In 1977 nobody would have called that the ❤️ in “I ❤️ NY” an emoji, because the word emoji — from Japanese e “picture” + moji “character” — didn’t exist until 1999, when an NTT DoCoMo employee, Shigetaka Kurita, coined it. And the word didn’t really filter into English until 2008, when the first Apple iPhone included the emoji feature. The red-heart symbol we now call an emoji was approved as part of Unicode 1.1 in 1993.

It’s a snowclone!

A snowclone is a fill-in-the-blank cliché; the name comes from the widespread (and erroneous) adage that “Eskimos have X words for snow.” Well-known snowclones include “X is the new Y,” “To X or not to X,” and the very prolific “Xgate.” Erin O’Connor, creator of the Snowclones Database, published a request in April 2009 for variations on “I [Heart] X,” and received 57 responses.

In some, a different symbol replaces the ❤️ — a Godzilla figure, for example.

Sometimes there are two symbols:

Sometimes it’s graphic:

Or, well, graphic.

Sometimes it’s a local joke. Here, for example, it helps to know that the intensifier “hella” originated in Oakland, California, sometime in the 1980s:

Another insider reference: The fleur-de-lis is the city symbol of New Orleans (NO).

And once you’ve seen it, you can never forget cartoonist Gary Larson’s dinosaur in a car with the license plate “I 8 NY.”

It’s a title!

Would there have been an I Heart Huckabees (2004) or an I Heart Shakey (2012) or an I Heart Arlo (2021-) without “I ❤️ NY”? Doubtful.

It’s a trademark!

“I ❤️ NY” is a registered trademark of Empire State Development, a New York state agency. But that hasn’t deterred hundreds of other “I Heart”s from clamoring for their own trademark protection, and often prevailing.

Combing through the U.S. trademark database I found registrations for, among many others, iHeart Medicare, I [Heart] Bitcoin, I [Heart] Therapy, I [Heart] Halal, I [Heart] Psychics, I [Heart] Mac & Cheese and More, I [Heart] Sleep — the heart symbol reclines, as if nodding off — and I [Heart] EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization). There’s even I ♡ Trademarks, a legal newsletter.

And the hearts aren’t exclusive to the U.S.: There’s an IHeartPizza — that’s the word heart, not an image of one — in the Netherlands.

Probably the best-known “I Heart” is iHeartMedia, the largest operator of radio stations in the U.S.; the company also owns iHeartRadio, the free podcast and streaming-radio platform. The iHeartRadio app was introduced in 2008 by its parent company, Clear Channel Communications; by 2014 digital media had become so central to the company that it changed its corporate name to iHeartMedia.

It’s a song!

There was an “I Love New York” song before there was an “I ❤️ NY” logo. Written by Steve “King of the Jingle” Karmen, it had a driving disco beat that helped obscure the fact that the lyrics didn’t quite add up. (“New York is diff’rent’ cause there’s no place else on earth quite like New York and that’s why … I love New York,”)

Who cares, right? In 1980 New York Governor Hugh Carey declared “I Love New York” the state anthem. And in 2020, during the early months of the coronavirus crisis, Karmen wrote a new verse for the song: “Whenever we face a crisis / New Yorkers find a way / When everyone works together /New heroes every day / New York is family / You know nothing beats family / And we’ll win this fight together / Cause we’re New York / That’s why I Love New York.” It was never commercially recorded or released.

It took Taylor Swift to give “I [Heart]” a true 21st-century twist. Her 2008 album “Beautiful Eyes” included an upbeat song about a recent breakup:
“Wish you could only see / I got an ‘I heart question mark’ / Written on the back of my hand.”

In the title, heart is spelled out; question mark is reduced to a symbol.

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