Even though it’s the Chinese Year of the Rabbit, 2011 so far belongs to the tiger. It seems tigers are everywhere these days. The year got off to a roar with the publication of Amy Chua’s memoir about strict Chinese parenting, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”

Tiger-wise, she’s not alone on the bestseller list. Tiger titles are everywhere. Right now, bestsellers include: “Tiger, Tiger” by Margaux Fragoso; “The Tiger’s Wife” by Tea Obreht; “A Tiger in the Kitchen” by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan; “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival” by John Valiant (a huge hit last year and still incredibly popular); and “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga (winner of the 2009 Booker Prize and still a best seller).

Of course, no article on tigers would be complete without mention of the colorful Charlie Sheen. Through the sheer force of his personality, his Adonis DNA, and our collective inability to look away from what will no doubt be a colossal train wreck, Sheen has coined an endless series of phrases that will be part of our pop culture lexicon forever: Living the dream, wizards and trolls, Winning!, dying is for fools, and the most popular and memorable, tiger blood.

My favorite Sheen-ism is this paean of denial: “I’m on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it once you will die. Your face will melt off and children will weep over your exploded body.” Interesting, but not nearly as catchy as tiger blood. The expression “tiger blood” is now in everyone’s vocabulary. Whenever my husband does something remotely manly, he looks at me and says, “Tiger blood.” This will never go away. Thanks Charlie.

Charlie Sheen said “I’ve got tiger blood” so many times in his first few interviews that NBC’s Jeff Rossen stopped him to ask if he meant he actually drank tiger blood. Sheen admitted it was simply a metaphor. But what the heck does it mean? On “Saturday Night Live,” Seth Myers pointed out that tigers have tiger blood, and they don’t act this way.

Presumably, having tiger blood means one is fierce and strong, maybe even carnivorous and unsentimental. In Sheen’s case, it obviously means having serious substance abuse problems, a loose grip on reality, being in complete denial, making poor parenting choices, and exposing children to a too-early education in, shall we say, permissive sexual mores. Who knew having tiger blood meant having live-in porn stars watch your kids? Duh, winning!

Maybe by having tiger blood, Sheen means the metaphorical high he gets from eating too many Hawaiian Shaved Ices. As every fair-goer knows, tiger blood is one of the most popular flavors of syrup for shaved ice and snow cones ($7.95 a quart at hawaiianshavedice.com). It is blood red, watermelon-strawberry flavored, and full of dyes and high fructose corn syrup. It will stain your kids’ mouth, make their teeth hurt, and give them brain freeze, but I don’t think they’ll want to engage in three-way parenting as a result. Unless they have Adonis DNA, in which case God help you.

The really remarkable thing about all this talk of tigers is that it usually takes an incredibly orchestrated marketing effort to turn a word into a brand. Tiger is a logical fit for branding, conjuring as it does an exotic, fierce, sleek beast. It can be used to great effect, as in team names and products. But it can also back fire, as author Amy Chua learned the hard way.

From the moment Chua’s book, “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” was first excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, a torrent of horrified public opinion catapulted the book onto best seller lists (there are 126 holds on the book at my library) and made tiger mom a household term. Chua defended herself and her parenting methods handily (she is certainly right about a lot of things), but the scornful and blistering public opinion took its toll.

Suddenly, the battle was on, it was tiger mom vs. all of America. Chua said she was shocked by the negative reaction to her book. She got so much hate mail she closed her e-mail account and stopped making appearances. The public was utterly unforgiving of her account of they way she was raised, the way she raised her daughters and her basic message that Americans are overly permissive with their children and are not preparing them for success.

Instead of tiger mom meaning fierce and protective, with your child’s best interest at heart, it came to mean ruthless, unforgiving, cruel, authoritarian parenting. It wasn’t tough love so much as just plain tough. Apparently, tigers are great for selling books, sports jerseys, and headache gels but bad when it comes to branding parenting styles and manic sit-com stars. I almost feel bad for tigers.

Stephanie Abbajay is a columnist for the Jersey County Journal.