What happened to the period after “Dr” in Dr Pepper?
Around 1950, the Dr. Pepper Company changed the font in the Dr Pepper logo to a slanted block-letter style, in which the lower case letter r resembled a diagonal line with a dot in the upper right-hand corner. Unfortunately, when paired with a period, the “Dr.” in Dr. Pepper looked more like “Di:” (Di + a colon), so the decision was made by the company to remove the period altogether. As W.W. “Foots” Clements, the President of the Dr Pepper Company from 1969 to 1980, explained in a 1984 interview (quoted in The Legend of Dr Pepper/Seven Up): “We took it out basically for two reasons. One, cosmetic, to make the new trademark look like Dr Pepper, and the other, to get us away from the medicinal connotation.” This didn’t stop soda jerks from calling the drink “M.D.” in their jargon, according to Paul Dickson in The Great American Ice Cream Book (New York: Atheneum, 1972), but that’s neither here nor there.
