moxie and Moxie

As a word, "moxie" means something like "energy, determination, spunk, courage, nerve, spirit, or guts". This term has been around since the 1930s and has continued in use, to some extent, into the early 21st century. "That girl has got moxie!"

I thought to look for an origin when I came across on Netflix the film MOXiE!, a 2021 American young adult comedy-drama film directed by Amy Poehler. 

But Moxie with a capital "M" is a brand of carbonated beverage that is among the first mass-produced soft drinks in the United States. It was originally marketed as "nerve food" which would "strengthen the nervous system" and was "very healthful" and a "drink for athletes" that "strengthens and invigorates" - hence its slang usage. 

It was created around 1876 by Augustin Thompson as a patent medicine called "Moxie Nerve Food" and was produced in Lowell, Massachusetts. Thompson claimed that it contained an extract from a rare, unnamed South American plant, which is now known to be gentian root. Thompson claimed that he named the beverage after Lieutenant Moxie, a purported friend of his, who he claimed had discovered the plant and used it as a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases (a panacea). 

from the 1922 ad "The Moxie Boy compels attention..."
Public Domain, Link

Etymologies say it likely derived from an Abenaki word that means "dark water" and that is found in lake and river names in Maine, where Thompson was born and raised. 

The sweet soda is similar to root beer, with a bitter aftertaste and it is flavored with gentian root extract, an extremely bitter substance commonly used in herbal medicine.

Moxie was designated the official soft drink of Maine in 2005 and continues to be regionally popular today, particularly in New England states, and is even available on Amazon. Moxie was purchased by The Coca-Cola Company in 2018.

Napster

Napster was a file-sharing service founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker that operated between June 1999 and July 2001. 

It was an innovative project by Fanning to create an independent peer-to-peer file-sharing service. When launched it allowed people to easily share their MP3 files (music) with other participants. It was followed by many other decentralized projects that used Napster's P2P file-sharing example, such as Gnutella, Freenet, BearShare, Soulseek, AudioGalaxy, LimeWire, Scour, Kazaa, and Grokster.

The idea of file-sharing from a decentralized, multi-user locations was a new and important piece of technology.

Napster and other services were shut down by court order for copyright infringement after strong legal actions against them from the record industry.

But why was it called Napster? Shawn Fanning joined a hacker chat to share his ideas and used the handle Napster. That was a name given to him by a junior high school basketball rival because of his nappy hair. In that hacker group, he connected with Parker and they started on the file-sharing network which would be given the nickname.

The reuse of the name has a complicated history. According to Wikipedia, as of this posting:
"Napster's brand and logos were acquired at a bankruptcy auction by Roxio which used them to re-brand the Pressplay music service as Napster 2.0. In September 2008, Napster was purchased by US electronics retailer Best Buy for $121 million. On December 1, 2011, pursuant to a deal with Best Buy, Napster merged with Rhapsody, with Best Buy receiving a minority stake in Rhapsody. On July 14, 2016, Rhapsody phased out the Rhapsody brand in favor of Napster and has since branded its service internationally as Napster and expanded toward other markets by providing music on-demand as a service to other brands like the iHeartRadio app and their All Access music subscription service that provides subscribers with an on-demand music experience as well as premium radio. On August 25, 2020, Napster was sold to virtual reality concert company MelodyVR. On May 10, 2022, Napster was sold to Hivemind and Algorand. The investor consortium also includes ATC Management, BH Digital, G20 Ventures, SkyBridge, RSE Ventures, Arrington Capital, Borderless Capital, and others."

Aspirin

Aspirin tablets with enteric coating to ease stomach irritation

Bayer is a German pharmaceutical company. Friedrich Bayer received a patent for Aspirin in 1899. It is probably the most ubiquitous of nonprescription drugs.

It has its roots (pun intended) in the bark of the willow tree. The quest to create a synthetic version was an international endeavor. 

Plants like willow and meadowsweet were used as pain remedies by Sumerians and Egyptians as early as 3000 BCE. The Greek physician Hippocrates reported giving willow-leaf tea to women in the throes of childbirth to help ease their labor pains. 

In 1783, an English clergyman named Edward Stone wrote a letter to the Royal Society. He explained that, over five years, he had had consistent success in relieving ague and fever in his parishioners by giving them dried white willow bark. In 1828, a German pharmacy professor isolated the active ingredient in willow bark and named the bitter yellow crystals “salicin,” after the Latin name for white willow — Salix alba. Extracting the salicin from plants was difficult, and required a large amount of plant matter to produce the necessary quantity, so scientists went to work on a synthetic version. 

A German chemist named Hermann Kolbe first synthesized salicylic acid in 1860. In 1895, a Bayer chemist named Felix Hoffmann was given the task of developing a “new and improved” synthetic salicylic acid product. He had a personal connection to the task. His father suffered from rheumatism but couldn’t take salicylic acid without vomiting because it irritated his stomach. Hoffmann studied the scientific literature and felt that combining an acetyl group with salicylic acid would yield a gentler product.

He came up with an effective synthetic version in 1897, and once it passed clinical trials, Bayer sought a patent for the brand name Aspirin.

The "A” for acetylsalicylic acid. The “-spir” for Spiraea ulmaria, or meadowsweet, which was a botanical source of salicylic acid. The "-in” because it was a common suffix for drugs at that time. 

By 1950, it was the best-selling pain reliever in the world.

a 1950s bottle and box

Kodak

An original Kodak camera

The company we know as Kodak was once known as the Eastman Kodak company. Digital photography and video killed most of their business which ranged from the average consumer to the big Hollywood movie studios. The company is not a big player in either market these days, but it once ruled the American film and photography business.

George Eastman received a patent for the first film camera in 1888. Eastman had been an enthusiastic photographer but found bulky cameras and heavy, breakable glass plates cumbersome and inconvenient. He wanted to make it easier for people to take up photography.

By 1880, he had improved on the previous photographic plate, so he formed his own business. He then developed cellulose film which could be rolled onto a spool which eliminated the need for plates altogether. 

Next, he designed a camera that could make use of a roll of film and he obtained a patent for that invention, which came to be known as the Kodak box camera. The box camera could hold enough rolled film to shoot 100 exposures and it completely revolutionized the art and science of photography. 

The genius of his company is summarized in the slogan he patented - “You press the button. We do the rest.” They sold you the camera, sold you the film, and did the processing and printing. They owned the whole cycle of photography. Even if you did your own developing and printing in a darkroom, you bought their chemicals and paper.

The name “Kodak” is also an invention of George Eastman. It actually has no special meaning. He once explained, “I devised the name myself. The letter ‘K’ had been a favorite with me — it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with ‘K.’ The word ‘Kodak’ is the result.”

The company known as Eastman Kodak eventually shortened its name to just Kodak. 

By Work-Order Studio to Commons., Public Domain, Link

junket

The word "junket" was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day recently and it is an interesting origin story. I associate the word with two things:. Now, I think of it as a promotional trip paid for by someone else (such as a press junket for a film by actors). As a child, I thought of it only as a dessert that my mother used to make. 

Junket goes back a long way. A long time ago a basket made of rushes (marsh plants used in weaving and basketwork) comes from the Latin word for "rush" which is juncus. It was used in English as a borrowed word in several forms finally becoming "junket." The word was used in English to name not just the plant and the baskets made from the plant, but also a type of cream cheese made in rush baskets. 

Going back to the 15th century, you can find the word associated with desserts ranging from curds and cream to sweet confections including the one my mom made that is still available.  

By the 16th century, junket had come to mean "banquet" or "feast" as well. 

Perhaps, some of those junket events came to include the journey to them and so the word broadened its usage to apply to pleasure outings or trips, whether or not the food was a part of it.

Gatorade

 

J. Robert Cade was a physician and the lead inventor of Gatorade. When he was working in the renal (kidney) division of the University of Florida College of Medicine in 1965 when the Gators coach came to him with a question.

He wanted to know why his football players didn't need to urinate after a game. The answer was dehydration, a subject that had really been studied in relation to sports before.

The philosophy at the time was that athletes should not drink water during strenuous activities. The idea was that it make them sick to their stomachs. 

Cade and his team began doing research and were surprised to find that players could lose as much as eighteen pounds of water weight during a three-hour game played in Florida heat. 

The researchers then turned to experiment with a drink that could replace not only fluids but electrolytes. An electrolyte is a substance that produces an electrically-conducting solution when dissolved in a polar solvent, such as water.

The first version tasted terrible and further experiments were concerned with taste. Eventually, they hit on some effective strong flavors. 

The University researchers initially considered naming their product "Gator-Aid" as something that could aid the Gator athletes. But using the "aid" suffix might require proving that the product had a clear medicinal use which would require clinical testing. Using "ade" (as in lemonade) would allow it could be classified as a soft drink.

Though Gatorade is best known as a sports drink, it is also used for postoperative patients, colonoscopy prep, and children suffering from diarrhea. 

Gatorade's commercial success came with Stokely-Van Camp’s buying the rights to produce and market the drink. The Gatorade brand was purchased by the Quaker Oats Company in 1983, which, in turn, was bought by PepsiCo in 2000. The University of Florida gets 20 percent of the royalties and in 2015 reported that its total take from its royalties in Gatorade had risen to $281 million.

Gatorade is PepsiCo's fourth-largest brand based on worldwide annual retail sales and its biggest competition is Coca-Cola's Powerade and Vitaminwater (and Lucozade in the UK). In the United States, Gatorade accounts for approximately 75% of the market share in the sports drink category.

Velcro

Here's another generic trademark post. Did you realize that it was back in 1958 that Velcro was patented? It was invented by George de Mestral, an electrical engineer from Switzerland who applied for his first patent when he was 12 years old, for a model airplane.

While on a hunting trip, he hiked through patches of burdock, a thistly plant that spreads its spiny seeds by latching them onto anything or anyone passing by. Back home he was picking the burs off his dog’s coat and his own clothes and got curious about how they so effectively attached to surfaces.

a hook and loop fastener generically called velcro

Under a microscope, he saw that each bristle was a tiny hook that was able to catch in the loops of clothing. It took him 10 years to get his hook and loop working by being sewn to nylon. There were hundreds of loops per inch and the initial production was slow and inefficient.

That is the origin story for the product. The word's origin is the combination (a portmanteau) of the beginnings of two French words velour, meaning "velvet" and crochet meaning "hook."

Velcro BVBA is a privately held company that produces fasteners and other products. It is the original patentor of the hook-and-loop fastener. Like other companies, it is not thrilled that their original product has been attached to generic products that are called "velcro."

Prius (automobile)

2019 Toyota Prius 

The Toyota Prius is a full hybrid electric automobile developed by Toyota and manufactured by the company since 1997.

When Toyota was namining the world's first mass-produced hybrid vehicle, they wanted a name that would connect to it being groundbreaking and the predecessor of the cars of the future. They turned to latin and chose "prius," meaning "first," "original," or "to go before."  It is the root of our modern word "prior."

An odd controversy surrounding the name emerged when people wanted to refer to more than one of the cars. What is the correct plural form?

The two leading contenders were "Prii" and "Priuses." Toyota initially said the plural was "Prius" (like moose or deer). But in February 2011, Toyota USA asked the US public to decide on what the most proper plural form of Prius should be. The choices included Prien, Prii, Prium, Prius, or Priuses. "Prii" was the most popular choice, but it was close - “Prii” received 25% but “Prius” came in a close second with 24%.

Technically, in Latin, the plural of “Prius” is actually “Priora” or “Priores.” (Latin assigns gender to nouns. “Priores” is the feminine plural, while “Priora” would be the neuter plural form.) Priora is a brand name used for a Russian automobile, the Lada Priora in 2007.

And don't be surprised if you still hear people use "Priuses" as the plural in English.

Kindle

As e-readers became mainstream, the Kindle from Amazon quickly became the frontrunner.  Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Store.

A single device was launched in 2007, but Kindle now comprises a range of devices, including e-readers with E Ink electronic paper displays and Kindle applications on all major computing platforms.

The name "Kindle" comes from the idea of "kindling" a fire, in this case an intellectual fire of new ideas that could spread to readers all over the world. Amazon originally used the codename "Fiona" for this e-reader.

The product's success led to the Kindle Fire, a tablet computer developed by Amazon and first released in November 2011. That first version featured a color 7-inch multi-touch display running a custom version of Google's Android operating system called Fire OS.

Currently, the product is called simply Fire. and it incorporates Amazon's Alexa voice assistant system.

Fortune magazine reported that, "As with most of Amazon’s devices, the aim isn’t to make money off of the hardware but instead to sell digital content such as books, movies, and TV shows to users."

Bluetooth

 Bluetooth Special Interest Group is the standards organisation that oversees  the development of
Bluetooth standards and the licensing of the Bluetooth technologies  and trademarks to manufacturers.

The origin story of the name and logo for the Bluetooth wireless technology standard is an unusual one. This technology that is now commonly used in smartphones, computers and many other devices allows for the exchange of data over short distances.

Bluetooth is managed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) which oversees development of the specification, manages the qualification program, and protects the trademarks.

The name goes back to the 10th century and a Danish King Harald Blatand. King Harald united warring factions in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark under one banner. This was the symbolism in mind when developers of the Bluetooth signal chose the King's name for their technology that could unite many different forms of technology—cars, computers, and mobile phones—under one communications network.

The name Bluetooth is an Anglicised version of the Scandinavian Old Norse Blåtand the epithet of King Harald. The name was proposed in 1997 by Jim Kardach of Intel who had developed a system for mobile phones to communicate with computers, and at that time he was reading the historical novel The Long Ships which is about Vikings and King Harald.

The Bluetooth logo is a ligature of two Runes:
the Runic letter ᚼ (Hagall) and
Runic letter ᛒ (Bjarkan), which are King Harald's initials

TiVo

By TiVo Inc., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

TiVo (TEE-voh) is a digital video recorder (DVR) developed and marketed by TiVo Corporation and introduced in 1999. TiVo is both the company and the DVR product that allows the scheduled recording of television programs.

As the early leader in this category, the name began to be a generic trademark used for all DVRs, particularly as a verb - "I tivoed that show."

It is sais that hundreds of anmes were considered for the company/product including "Bongo" and "Lasso." The final name is a combination of TV (in caps) for the television aspect, and the i and o (lower case) referencing the acronym "I/O," which is used in tech applications to mean "input/output."

Generic Trademarks

Registered trademark symbol

A generic trademark (AKA genericized trademark or proprietary eponym) is a trademark or brand name that becomes so popular that is has become either generic name for, or synonymous with, a general class of product or service. This is not something that a trademark holder wants to happen. So, in this case, you can be too popular. The process of a product's name becoming genericized is known by the rather terrible term of genericide.

When this genericide occurs, its original owner loses some of their intellectual property. Examples of generic trademarks include: Thermos, Kleenex, ChapStick, Aspirin, Dumpster, Band-Aid, Velcro, Hoover, Jet Ski and Speedo. This process sometimes is limited to a particular country, though it can apply worldwide. (List of generic trademarks)

A recent case is Chooseco LLC, the publisher of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series, suing Netflix Inc., saying the streaming company’s recently released interactive film “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” used the series’ trademark without permission. As is always the case, the trademark owner claims that this use is besmirching the brand’s value.

The generic "teleprompter" is now used for the display device that prompts a person speaking with an electronic visual text like cue cards. It began as the product TelePrompTer (with that internal capitalization) back in the 1950s.

The Otis Elevator Company advertised that it offered "the latest in elevator and escalator design," and thereby used the generic term "elevator" along with Otis's trademark "Escalator" product of moving staircases in the same way. Later, the Trademark Office and the courts concluded that, if Otis used their trademark in that generic way, they could not stop Westinghouse from calling its moving staircases "escalators", and a valuable trademark was lost through genericization.

In America, aspirin is the generic name for the product sold by many companies. But it is still a Bayer trademark name for acetylsalicylic acid in about 80 countries, including Canada where you will find both generic "ASA tablets" and others carrying the Aspirin trademark because the trademark owned by Bayer is still recognized there.

Genericization typically occurs over a period of time because: 1) in which a mark is not used as a trademark (i.e., where it is not used to exclusively identify the products or services of a particular business) 2) where a mark falls into disuse entirely or 3) where the trademark owner does not enforce its rights through actions for passing off or trademark infringement.

Trademark owners may consider developing a generic term for the product to be used in descriptive contexts, to avoid inappropriate use of the "house" mark. Such a term is called a generic descriptor. Examples: "Kleenex tissues" ("facial tissues" being the generic descriptor) or "Velcro brand fasteners" for Velcro brand name hook-and-loop fasteners.

It is often difficult to stop genericide, though companies such as Johnson & Johnson's effort to protect their Band-Aid product not to be used with any similar product.

Google has tried to prevent the term 'googling' in reference to Web searches, but the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary have both noted the widespread use of the verb coinage and yet still defining "google" (all lower case) as a verb meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

I recall examples of companies issuing lawsuits for one dollar to prevent the genericization of a core trademark. The Xerox corporation tried extensive public relations campaigns to push the use of "photocopy" as a verb, rather than the generic "xerox." They were successful, but part of that comes from the fact that there became so many other copier companies that the shorter "copy" is now the most common verb used.

You will find new examples in the news all the time. Adobe Systems doesn't want their trademarked product, Photoshop, used as "photoshopped" to mean a modified image.

Source: wikipedia.org

Blackberry (phones)

BlackBerry 8820, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Classic - by Kt38138 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

BlackBerry is a line of smartphones, tablets, and services originally designed and marketed by Canadian company BlackBerry Limited (formerly known as Research In Motion, or RIM). It is a product name, though many people think it is the company's name.

Research in Motion first offered their Inter@ctive Pager 900 in 1996. It was a clamshell (flip) device that allowed two-way paging. Their first device to carry the BlackBerry name was the BlackBerry 850, an email pager, in January 1999 which integrated email.

A number of other names had been considered for that integrated model, including "LeapFrog" because the company considered the device to be "leaps and bounds" over everything else on the market. EasyMail, MegaMail and ProMail were also considered as well as "Strawberry" because the tiny keys resembled seeds. But when someone felt the word "straw" sounded slow and negative. The name BlackBerry was coined by the marketing company Lexicon Branding and BlackBerry with its internal second capital B name was chosen due to the resemblance of the keyboard's buttons to that of the drupelets that compose the blackberry fruit, as well as the popular device color of black.

President Obama famously fought to keep his BlackBerry phone and the product had a loyal following in its time. It picked up the nickname of "CrackBerry" because of its addictive nature.

Bing

The Bing home page varies its look with each refresh - screenshot via Wikimedia

Microsoft was developing a search engine to compete with Google and others and wanted a name that was short, memorable, and easy to spell or rather not misspell. Their previous attempts at a search engine had been called MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search.

Before settling on "Bing," they had supposedly considered "Bang.” That was rejected because if it was used as a verb (as in "Googling" something), the resulting "I Banged it" sounded inappropriately obscene.

So, they went with “Bing” which met their requirements. It also suggested the term sometimes used when someone finds something they were looking for - bingo!

I also see mentioned that when a lightbulb goes off over a cartoon character's head(a "lightbulb moment") to mean they just got a good idea, you often hear a “bing” sound effect.

In China, the Bing website is called bì yìng, which translates as “very certain to answer.” That sounds good too. Bing's detractors have erroneously suggested that it is an acronym for Bing Is Not Google.

Google

Larry Page and Sergei Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. But they changed the name to Google.

Supposedly, the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word "googol" which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Googol was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide very large quantities of information.

The original Google search engine was on the Stanford University website servers with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. The official domain name for google.com was registered on September 15, 1997 and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998 when it was still based in a garage.

Some brands become generic nouns as the vernacular word for a category. Such is the case with brands such as Band-Aid (for any adhesive bandage) and Kleenex (for paper tissues) and in the past "fridge" for any refrigerator had originated with the Frigidaire brand. This is both an honor and a brand confusion issue.

People began to use "google" to mean a search engine and eventually as a verb, as in "I'll google that." Larry Page used it as a verb form before he even launched the company. Though not as commonly used to mean "to search" now, at one time "to google" might have meant to use Yahoo or Bing or AltaVista or any one of the other competing search engines.

Marshmallows and S'mores

Modern marshmallows are made in a variety of colors and shapes

Most of us know the marshmallow as a candy confection. But I wondered how this sugar, water and gelatin whipped to a spongy consistency and molded into small cylindrical pieces with a corn starch coating got its name.

I had some vague recollection of marshmallow being a plant and some quick searching told me that I was correct.

The word marshmallow comes from the mallow plant (Althaea officinalis) that is a genus of an herb native to parts of Europe, North Africa, and Asia.

"Marsh" is used because the mallow plant grows in marshes and other damp areas.

We don't know exactly when marshmallow plants led to the confection. As early as 2000 B.C, Egyptians were said to be the first to make marshmallows for eating. They were considered a delicacy for gods and royalty.

The root of the plant was used as a medicinal to soothe coughs and sore throats, and to heal wounds.

The edible version was made by boiling pieces of root pulp with sugar until it thickened, then strained, cooled and shaped.

choclate-covered marshmallows

In the early 19th century, French confectioners pioneered the innovation of whipping up the marshmallow sap and sweetening it, to make a candy similar to modern marshmallow. In the late 19th century, French manufacturers thought of using egg whites or gelatin, combined with modified corn starch, to create the chewy base.

Traditional marshmallows used marshmallow root, but most commercially manufactured marshmallows instead use gelatin. Vegans and some vegetarians avoid gelatin, so there are versions which use a substitute non-animal gelling agent such as agar.

Marshmallow creme and fluff products generally contain little or no gelatin (which is used to allow the confection to retain its shape) and generally use egg whites instead.

toasted marshmallow

A popular camping or backyard tradition in the United Kingdom,] North America, New Zealand and Australia is the roasting or toasting of marshmallows over an open flame.vHeld on the end of a stick or skewer over the fire, a caramelized outer skin with a liquid, molten layer underneath can be created.

S'mores are a traditional campfire treat in the United States, made by placing a toasted marshmallow on a slab of chocolate which is placed between two graham crackers. These can then be squeezed together to cause the chocolate to start to melt.

S'more is a contraction of the phrase "some more" and one early recipe for a s'mores confection is found in recipes published by the Campfire Marshmallows company in the 1920s. there it was called a "Graham Cracker Sandwich" that was already popular with Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. In 1927, a recipe for "Some More" was published in Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts.

The contracted term "s'mores" appears in conjunction with the recipe in a 1938 publication aimed at summer camps.

S'more about all this at wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow

Macintosh - an apple, a raincoat and a computer

In 1823, a Scottish chemist named Charles Macintosh sold the first raincoat.

He had been trying to find uses for the waste products of gasworks. He discovered that a substance called coal-tar naphtha dissolved India rubber and allowed the melted rubber to bond to wool. That created a waterproof fabric.

These first raincoats unfortunately smelled like coal tar and rubber. They also were stiff in cold weather, and gummed up in hot weather, but they found a market. Farmers, fishermen, and firemen were early fans.

The coats were so popular in Great Britain that people said “Mac” or a “Mack” when they meant the generic raincoat, even if it wasn't actually a Mackintosh. The Mac or Mac-style raincoats are still made today.

Another eponym story is that of the the McIntosh apple variety. Popularly known as a Mac, this apple cultivar is the national apple of Canada.

The fruit has red and green skin, a tart flavour, and tender white flesh, which ripens in late September. It is considered an all-purpose apple, suitable both for cooking and eating raw.

John McIntosh discovered the original McIntosh sapling on his Dundela farm in Upper Canada in 1811. He and his wife bred it, and the family started grafting the tree and selling the fruit in 1835.

Once one of the most common and popular of apples in North America, the fruit's popularity has fallen the past few decades, but U.S. Apple Association website says it is still one of the fifteen most popular apple cultivars in the United States.

Speaking of apples, Apple Inc. Macintosh computer has been with us since 1984. It has been branded as the "Mac" since 1998, though the Mac name was popularized by users almost as soon as it was introduced.

This series of personal computers was the company's first mass-market personal computer featuring an integral graphical user interface and mouse

Apple Inc. employee Jef Raskin is credited with conceiving and starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s and for selecting that variety of apple as the name for the new computer line that followed the Apple IIe computer.

Radar and Microwave Ovens

RADAR was coined in 1940 by the United States Navy as an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging (or RAdio Direction And Ranging). The term radar has since been used in English and other languages as a common noun, losing all capitalization.

Radar is a technology based on the principle that radio waves can bounce off the surfaces of large objects. A radio wave beam pointed in one direction will bounce back at the source if they encounter an obstruction in their path. For radar detection, measuring the bounced-back radio waves can indicate distant objects or objects hidden from view by clouds or fog can be detected. Radar was used to detect planes and ships, and later weather patterns since rainstorms also caused interference that could be measured.

But what does that have to do with microwave ovens? Amana, a subsidiary of Raytheon corporation, called their first model the “Radarange” (radar + range, as in stove). Do microwave ovens use radar?

During World War II, the American military needed more magnetrons for radar installations, and Raytheon was given the assignment. By redesigning the magnetron so that components could be punched out from sheet metal, mass production of magnetrons was increased dramatically.

When an engineer was working with a live magnetron, he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had started to melt. He thought that the radio waves from the magnetron caused the heating. After further testing, including popping corn, Raytheon filed for a patent for using radar technology for cooking. An oven using radar technology was made.

Though microwaves has been used for commercial food preparation since the 1950s, 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Amana ovens sold for home use in 1967.

Evian

This post is about what is NOT the origin of a name.

Evian water (French pronunciation ​evjɑ̃) is a brand of mineral water. Many people have noticed that the name is naive spelled backwards. The idea that comes along with that reversal is that this fancy bottled water and that the joke is on those naive consumers willing to pay a premium price for water.

But that is not true.

Evian is owned by Danone, a French multinational corporation that sells the mineral water and also a line of organic skin care products and a luxury resort in France under that name.

The origin goes back to 1789 when the Marquis of Lessert drank some water from the Sainte Catherine spring on the land of a M. Cachat. The marquis had been suffering from kidney and liver problems, but claimed that the water cured his ailments.

Still sold in glass bottles too

In 1859, it became a business, and in 1878 the French Ministry of Health actually authorized the bottling of "Cachat water" because of a recommendation by the Medicine Academy.

The water sold as Evian comes from several sources near Évian-les-Bains, on the south shore of Lake Geneva and was first sold in glass bottles in 1878.

In 1969, it started to be sold in plastic (PVC) bottles and it was introduced in 1978 to the U.S. market. In 1995, Evian switched to collapsible PET bottles, though it is still available in glass bottles too.

SMART cars

smart Fortwo cabriolet - CC BY-SA 3.0,

smart Automobile is a division of Daimler AG that manufactures and markets the smart Fortwo and smart Forfour. The official trademarked name is stylized as "smart", with all lowercase letters.

“Smart” sounds like a good name for cars that are meant to be small, smartly designed city cars. But it turns out that despite the lowercase letter, this name is an acroym.

The early development of the brand and styling was a venture of Swatch and Mercedes and thus the name reflects the idea of Swatch Mercedes ART.

The corporate branding uses lowercase logotype for the "smart" and a visual logo incorporating the letter "c" for "compact" and an arrow for "forward thinking".


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