Jackknife

One thing that comes to mind - perhaps first for people these days - is when you hear the word "jackknife" is a wrecked big rig on the highway with the tractor wedged against the trailer at a 45-90 degree angle.

This term is a reference to the folding pocket knife (larger than a "pen knife") once known as the jackknife whose blade can be folded back into its handle. Visually, this folding resembles a jackknifed truck and trailer.

The name "jackknife" comes from the heyday of seafaring. Sailors commonly carried these tools and they were associated with sailors. Because of its link to the Mariners who carried them the night became known as the jackknife which etymologists believe is a reference to a sailing vessel's flag or Jack staff.

The use of jackknife as a verb (sometimes jack-knife) goes back to American English in the Revolutionary War days when it took on the meaning "to stab." Around the time of the Civil War, it also had the meaning of "to fold or bend" your body as with the knife.

Starting around 1922, it started being used to describe a kind of swimming dive.

It didn't become something used to describe truck accidents until the second half of the 20th century. 

3 divers, the topmost one doing a jackknife

High Jinks and Jinx

If you start looking into the history of the term "high jinks", high jinks will ensue.

High jinks, also spelled hi-jinks and sometimes as hijinks, is defined as "boisterous or rambunctious carryings-on" or "carefree antics or horseplay."

It is a word I associate more with my parents and grandparents and was in popular usage in the mid-1900s.

'Hey-jinks' was a dice game in which one person would throw dice and have to complete a task—such as drinking all the liquor in a cup. The high in high jinks might have come from the drinking game aspect.

Originally, "jinks" was a dice game and references go all he way back to a 1683 English translation of Erasmus: "And as to all those Shooing-horns of drunkenness, the keeping every one his man, the throwing Hey-jinks, the filling of bumpers, the drinking two in a hand..."

This hey-jinks dice game of chance seems to have involved completing a task - maybe more of a dare or challenge and possibly something for the amusement of the group. It seems that the dice game itself fell away over the years and what remains was the dares that the game had inspired.

The word "jink" may be related to a Scottish verb jink that means "to move quickly or unexpectedly with sudden turns and shifts." This dodging action later meant "to trick or deceive" but by the time of that usage the high jinks usage was also around.

Jinks does not seem to have any connection to "jinx" which appears later in the language. The Online Etymology Dictionary states that 'jynx', meaning a charm or spell, was in usage in English as early as the 1690s. The Americanized spelling of "jinx" appears in 1911.

Jynx/jinx is traced to the 17th-century word jyng, meaning "a spell", and ultimately to the Latin word iynx (also spelled jynx, as in Latin 'j' and 'i' are the same letter). And that Latin word came from the Greek name of the bird iunx. This bird was associated with sorcery and was used in the casting of spells and in divination. The Ancient Romans and Greeks traced the bird's mythological origins to a sorceress named Iynx, who was transformed into this bird to punish her for a spell cast on the god Zeus.

In modern usage, a jinx is a superstition and folklore for a curse or the attribute of attracting bad or negative luck. Someone or something is said to be a jinx or to be jinxed if misfortune is associated with it.

This superstition shows up in sports. If a baseball pitcher is pitching a perfect game, it is considered a jinx to talk about it. Some people believe that pointing out a streak of particularly good fortune will "jinx it" and cause it to end.

Jinx is also a children's game that is initiated when at least two people say any same word or phrase at the same time. One of them then calls "jinx" on the other.

Pseudonyms and Nicknames: Musicians

Many a performer has changed his or her name to benefit their careers. A pseudonym is a fictitious name used by a person, or less often, a group. I have been looking at some pseudonyms here whether they are known as pen names (writers), noms de guerre, (resistance fighters or terrorists) or the stage names, for actors, musicians and other performers.

Why use a pseudonym? Sometimes it is done to mask a person's ethnic backgrounds in order to avoid prejudices, though I would hope that is less the case today than it was a hundred years ago. It can also be to create a personae. It can be simply to differentiate yourself from other performers with the same or similar names.

Just a few musician pseudonyms of popular musicians:




Bob Dylan's real is Robert Zimmerman. Around 1960, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan," a name influenced by the poet Dylan Thomas. He has certainly built a life story for "Bob Dylan" that is part fact, part fiction. In a 2004 CBS interview, Bob said "You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free."




David Bowie was born David Jones and he changed his name to avoid confusion with David (Davy) Jones of the pop band The Monkees. It's hard to believe that anyone would ever have confused Bowie and Davy Jones, but...

Bowie's debut single, "Liza Jane", was credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees. It was flop and after several bands and singles, he decided to use the name David Bowie. The name came from the American soldier Jim Bowie and the "Bowie knife" he popularized.

Wendy Carlos, the American composer and electronic musician, was born as Walter Carlos and first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, including the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange.

Carlos underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1972 and was first credited as "Wendy" on Switched-On Brandenburgs in 1979.

The popular singer of the 1970s, Cat Stevens, was born as Stephen Demetre Georgiou. But he changed his name for religious reasons and took a long break from performing as Yusuf Islam.

Eminem just took the initials of his real name, Marshall Mathers, and rewrote it phonetically.

Katy

Katy Perry chose to not use her real name, Katy Hudson, to avoid confusion with another famous Hudson she shares a name with - the actress Kate Hudson.

Singer Elvis Costello went for the King's name and a new surname rather than Declan Patrick McManus.

Musicians and singers can use pseudonyms to allow artists to collaborate with artists on other labels while avoiding the need to gain permission from their own labels.
Jerry Samuels made songs under the pseudonym Napoleon XIV and Beatles singer-guitarist George Harrison played guitar on Cream's song "Badge" using a pseudonym.

Pseudonyms are also used as stage names in bands: Tracii Guns in LA Guns, Axl Rose and Slash in Guns N' Roses, Mick Mars in Mötley Crüe, or C.C. Deville in Poison.

Brian Hugh Warner is more commonly known as Marilyn Manson, the incongrunt merging of Marilyn from Marilyn Monroe and Manson from convicted serial killer Charles Manson.

Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. is the creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks, but wrote original songs, arranged, and produced those records under his real name, but when he performed on them he was listed as David Seville. (He also wrote songs using the name Skipper Adams.)

Danish pop pianist Bent Fabric, whose full name is Bent Fabricius-Bjerre, wrote his biggest instrumental hit "Alley Cat" under the name Frank Bjorn.

A rather unique use if by the musician Prince who used an unpronounceable "Love Symbol" as a pseudonym. Interestingly, "Prince" is his actual first name and not a stage name. He wrote the song "Sugar Walls" for Sheena Easton under the alias "Alexander Nevermind" and "Manic Monday" for The Bangles as "Christopher Tracy" and he produced albums early in his career as "Jamie Starr".

The idea of being "too ethnic" hit a number of Italian-American singers have used stage names: Dean Martin (born Dino Paul Crocetti), Connie Francis (born Concetta Franconero), Frankie Valli (born Francesco Castelluccio), Tony Bennett (born Anthony Benedetto), and Lady Gaga (born Stefani Germanotta).

Tupac Shakur used the stage name 2Pac, but was born either Lesane Parish Crooks or Parish Lesane Crooks. He legally changed his name early on to Tupac Amaru Shakur.

Elton John used the name professionally before he legally adopted it in 1972 as a change from his given name of Reginald Kenneth Dwight.

Like jazz musicians earlier, many hip-hop and rap artist prefer to use pseudonyms. Iggy Azalea comes from her dog name, Iggy, and her home street in Mullumbimby, Azalea street.

Confusingly, Diddy was previously known at various times as Puffy, P. Diddy, and Puff Daddy. He announced on Twitter that Sean Combs will no longer be answering to Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Diddy or any other names but "Love a.k.a. Brother Love'." For now...

Punk music singers and band members often replaced their real names with punkier names: Sid Vicious (real name John Simon Ritchie) of the late 1970s band Sex Pistols is a good example.

Punk rock band The Ramones also had every member take the last name of Ramone - though I don't think that is a punkier name, you might have thought they were a family.

Jazz musicians often take on nicknames that are not always true pseudonyms, but names they are known by to the public. Billie Holiday was known as "Lady Day." Charlie Parker was "Bird" for "Yardbird."

Others include: "Fatha" Earl Hines; "High Priest of Bop," Thelonious Monk; "High Priestess of Soul," Nina Simone; "Newk," Sonny Rollins, and many musicians with the nicknames "Red" and "Sonny."

Iron Maiden

IRON MAIDEN is an English heavy metal band formed in 1975 by bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris. They are considered one of the most successful heavy metal bands in history and have sold over 100 million copies of their albums worldwide. The band's discography includes 38 albums, including sixteen studio albums, twelve live albums, four EPs, and seven compilations.

Some of their best-selling albums include a string of hits:The Number of the Beast (1982), 1983's Piece of Mind, 1984's Powerslave, 1985's live release Live After Death, 1986's Somewhere in Time and 1988's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.

Steve Harris attributes the band's name to a film adaptation of The Man in the Iron Mask novel by Alexandre Dumas, which reminded him of the medieval iron maiden. That was a medieval torture device that placed a person upright in a coffin that had a spiked door that pierced the person when the lid was closed.

The iron maiden device open

Quixotic and Scrooge

Quixotic is a word derived from fiction. It comes from the lead character in Don Quixote written by Miguel de Cervantes.

In the novel, Quixote decides to become a knight in order to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. Based on this character, you might refer to someone as quixotic if they are unrealistically optimistic or perhap have a comically chivalrous approach to life.

In a similar way, the word scrooge was coined in the same way.

Calling someone a scrooge is saying they are a mean and possibly also a overly tight with their money.

We take this word from the character Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Pound, Number sign or Hashtag

What’s the origin of the hashtag  # symbol?

Well, right off we need to note that it has be known by several names: the pound sign, the number sign, the octothorpe and the hashtag. 

Though the hashtag usage is recent, it also has an origin going back to ancient Rome.

As a hashtag, it precedes a word or phrase to clarify or categorize the accompanying text. It came into wide use in the past decade via social networks, especially on Twitter. Looking at the Twitter home page, you can see the currently trending (popular) hashtags. People can follow hashtags to see what content has been posted about the subject, such as #DonaldTrump or #ClimateChange, and follow online trends.

The first use of the pound sign on Twitter was:

How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]? 

by Chris Messina ("factoryjoe") on August 23, 2007.



The possible ancient origin is to the symbol ℔, an abbreviation of the Roman term libra pondo, which translates as "pound weight." Ultimately, the symbol was reduced for clarity as an overlay of two horizontal strokes "=" across two slash-like strokes "//".

The symbol is described as the "number" character in an 1853 treatise on bookkeeping. It seems to have been used primarily in handwritten materials. In the printing business, the numero (№) symbol and barred-lb (℔) are used for "number" and "pounds" respectively. It appeared on the keyboard of the Remington Standard typewriter in 1886.

To confuse our international readers, the US pound sign, number sign or hash symbol "#" is often used in information technology to highlight a special meaning. But "Pound sign" in the UK means "£"  and is used for money, while "#" is called hash, gate, and occasionally octothorpe.

The symbol is also used in several ways in computer coding.

The graphically similar symbol of the sharp (♯) is used in musical nomenclature. Also similar is the the equal-and-parallel symbol (⋕) from mathematics, though both of these are distinguished by its combination of level horizontal strokes and right-tilting vertical strokes.

Pseudonyms: Stage Names - Actors, Singers

We have written before about the use of pseudonyms by different groups. here are some "stage names" used by actors and directors.

Natalie

Natalie Portman is a dual Israeli and American citizen who used her grandmother’s maiden name as a surname rather than her birth name, Herschlag.

Demi Moore's real name is Demetria Guynes. She must be into pseudonyms because two of her exes used them too. Bruce Willis was born as Walter Willis and Ashton was born with the name Christopher Kutcher.

Albert Brooks chose that name although I doubt that any of us would confuse him with his real name twin: Albert Einstein.

Actress Meg Ryan went for shortening her real name of Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra.

Natalie Wood, probably under pressure from a film studio, Americanized her given name: Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko. Born to Russian immigration parents, the change was not unusual at the time. Another Hollywood namechanger was the Swedish Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, better known as Greta Garbo.

Woody Allen did a switch from his original Allen Konigsberg.

Comedian Louis C.K.'s real name is Louis Szekely which is really just just an easier way to say his actual last name, which is pronounced “See-kay.”

Joaquin Phoenix's real name is Joaquin Rafael Bottom.

Chevy Chase rejected his given name of Cornelius Crane Chase. Though I have read that the actor got his name from his grandmother who liked the traditional English song “The Ballad of Chevy Chase.” I always suspected that it had something to do with the city Chevy Chase in Maryland.

Rather than shorten her first name, Tina Fey shortened her middle name: Elizabeth Stamatina Fey. But she did get to name her 30 Rock character Liz.

Ben

Ben Kingsley, perhaps best known for playing Gandhi, was born, like Barack Obama, to a white mother and Kenyan father of Indian Muslim descent. His birth name is Krishna Pandit Bhanji.

Actress Olivia Wilde started with the name Olivia Jane Cockburn, but dropped that tough to deal with last name that suggest to the mean kids "penis."

Actor Alan Alda seems to have gone pretty far away from his given name of Alphonso d’Abruzzo, but he came up with that surname by putting together the first two letters of his first and last name. AL + DA.

Portia De Rossi had a rather simple name, Amanda Lee Rogers, and went the other way by making it sound more exotic.

Diane Keaton's real name is Diane Hall. She grabbed the last name from the famous silent movie comedian Buster Keaton and her then-boyfriend and director Woody Allen used her real last name for her eponymous character in Annie Hall.

Michael Caine was born with Maurice Micklewhite, but opted to use as his last name Humphrey Bogart’s character in The Caine Mutiny.

Larry King was born to an Austrian father and mother from Belarus, both of whom were Orthodox Jews who named their baby Lawrence Harvey Zeigler.

Whoopi Goldberg started as Caryn Johnson but on the advice of her mother who said to take a Jewish last name believing that it would help her comedy career if people thought she was Jewish. I'm not sure that explains the Whoopi part.

Wrestler and sometime actor Hulk Hogan chose not to use his not very threatening real name: Terry Jean Bollette.

1950s/60s actor heartthrob Rock Hudson had the un-hearthrobby name Leroy Harold Scherer, Jr.

In the golden days of the Hollywood studio system it was pretty standard to change actor's names.

Joan Crawford started as Lucille LeSueur.

Kirk Douglas wisely was renamed from Issur Danielovitch Demsky.

Cary Grant wouldn't have been Cary Grant if he had stayed with Archibald Alexander Leach.

Fred Astaire was Frederick Austerlitz and his dance partner, Ginger Rogers, was born Virginia Katherine McMath.

Marilyn Monroe was considered a gawky kid when she was Norma Jean Mortensen.

Martin Sheen was Ramon Antonio Gerard Estevez. His son Charlie Sheen was Carlos Estevez, but his brother Emilio Estevez stuck to the original.

Audrey Hepburn was Edda Kathleen van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston. That was a wise change.

Judy Garland began as Frances Gumm.

Carmen

And name changing is still pretty common.

You didn't think Carmen Electra was born with that name, did you? She was the less exciting Tara Patrick.

Madam Secretary star Tea Leoni is a version of her given name of Elizabeth Tea Pantaleoni.

Helen Mirren wisely opted out from Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironov.

The normal-sounding Julianne Moore had the perhaps-too-normal-sounding Julie Anne Smith at birth.

Michael Keaton went with a new surname because his real name, Michael Douglas, was already in use in movies.

Director Spike Lee added some spike to his given name,  Shelton Lee.

Pseudonyms: Noms de Plume and Noms de Guerre

Pseudonyms are used by many celebrities. One version is the "pen name" (nom de plume) which is a variant form of a real name adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of his or her works in place of their "real" name.

Why use a pseudonym? Actors and other often change their names to make them sound more "normal," less ethnic or even to sound more exotic. Authors might do it for those reasons too, but they also have other reasons.

The French phrase nom de plume is occasionally used as a synonym for the English term "pen name." This known as "back-translation." The term nom de plume "evolved" in Britain, but there was already the term nom de guerre used in French. The British didn't understand that particular usage as guerre means "war" in French and for authors this made no sense, so they created (not borrowed) their own "French" phrase.

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler, and Lemony is also the narrator of many of his novels. He used the name while doing research for his first book when he needed to give a name in order to obtain materials that were "offensive" because he didn't want to use his real name.

Some authors, mostly women, have used pseudonyms to disguise gender and ensure that their works were accepted by publishers and/or the public.

Mary Ann Evans wrote under the pen name George Eliot.

Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baronne Dudevant, used the much more common pseudonym George Sand.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë had published under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell respectively.

Karen Blixen's book Out of Africa was originally published under the pen name Isak Dinesen.

I used to teach the popular young adult novel The Outsiders  which is listed on the cover as being written by S.E. Hinton. And that is the author's name and initials, but S.E. is Susan Eloise Hinton. The male-oriented novel might not have had many male readers if it carried a female name.

Other women using initials include Harry Potter creator J. K. (Joanne) Rowling, K. A. Applegate, P. N. Elrod, D. C. Fontana, G. A. Riplinger and J. D. Robb.

Initials can also be used to avoid confusion with another author or notable individual. The very famous British politician Winston Churchill wrote under the name Winston S. Churchill to distinguish his work from the then better known American novelist of the same name.

Mathematician and fantasy writer Charles Dodgson, also wrote his Alice and Wonderland fiction as Lewis Carroll.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens used the aliases Mark Twain and less often Sieur Louis de Conte for different works.

Joseph Conrad was the Anglicized choice made by Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, the 20th-century Polish-British author.

American author of short stories and novels, O. Henry, was really William Sydney Porter.

Stephen King published four novels under the name Richard Bachman because publishers didn't feel the public would buy more than one novel per year from a single author.

Anne Rice (Howard Allen Frances O'Brien) also used two other aliases: Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure.

Japanese poets who write haiku often the follow the tradition of using a pen name (haigō).

The haiku master Matsuo Bashō had used two other haigō before he became fond of a banana plant (bashō) that had been given to him by a disciple and started using it as his pen name starting at age 36.

At one time in France, a nom de guerre was a "war name" adopted or assigned to new recruits as he enlisted in the French army. These pseudonyms were official and a kind of predecessor of identification numbers.

Soldiers were identified by their first names, their family names, and theirnoms de guerre. These pseudonyms were usually related to the soldier's place of origin. Jean Paul dit Champigny might be used for a soldier coming from a town Champigny. In 1716, a nom de guerre was mandatory for every enlisted soldier. Some of these noms de guerre eventually replaced the real family name.

Revolutionaries and resistance leaders that came later and outside of France, such as Lenin, Trotsky, Golda Meir, Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, and Josip Broz Tito, sometimes adopted their noms de guerre as their proper names.

Freudian slips

"Freudian slip" is the phrase used to describe a usually embarrassing slip of the tongue. They are beyond simply using the wrong word in that we interpret them to be revealing of our innermost thoughts or unconscious feelings.

If someone said that they were interested in "watching that new show on TV" but actually said that they were interested in "watching that new snow on TV," I don't think anyone would read any psychological meaning into it.

But in 1988, when then Vice-President, George H.W Bush gave a speech on live television and said “We’ve had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We’ve had some sex… uh… setbacks” the audience did think there was something else going on.

The Freudian slip is named after the father of psychoanalysis and lover of symbols, Sigmund Freud. In his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he described and analyzed many  seemingly trivial, bizarre, or nonsensical errors and slips patients had made. Freud believed that it was our unconscious mind that unlocked our behaviors and, like dreams, slips of the tongue revealed those hidden thoughts.

Freud referred to these slips as Fehlleistungen meaning "faulty actions", "faulty functions" or "misperformances" in German. The Greek term parapraxes from Greek παρά (para), meaning 'another' + πρᾶξις (praxis), meaning 'action') was a term created by Freud's English translator, as is the form "symptomatic action."

A lot of what Freud believed has fallen out of favor in psychology, and there are people who now believe that many cases of Freudian slips are really more indicators of the way language is formed in the brain rather than unconscious thoughts slipping out.

The Austrian linguist Rudolf Meringer, a contemporary of Freud, also collected verbal mistakes, and concluded that most slips of the tongue were from mixing up the letters, not the actual words.

When Senator Ted Kennedy gave a speech about education and said  “Our national interest ought to be to encourage the breast - the best - and brightest,” was that his unconscious speaking or an example of a "forward error" when the "r" sound from forward in the sentence in "brightest" changed "best" to "breast"? Judge for yourself.

Litmus test

Litmus is a water-soluble mixture of different dyes extracted from lichens. The word comes from lytmos and Old Norse litmosi meaning dye-moss. The main use of litmus is to test whether a solution is acidic or basic. It is often absorbed onto filter paper to produce one of the oldest forms of pH indicator. Litmus turns red under acidic conditions and blue under alkaline conditions.

The more modern figurative use of the term "litmus test" is a situation in which you arrive at a conclusion based on a single factor, such as an attitude, event, or fact) is decisive. A headline such as "Eurozone Elections: Litmus Test for the EU" is an example of that usage.

MGMT

"Me & Michael" from MGMT's 2018 album Little Dark Age

MGMT is an American rock band formed in 2002. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden formed the band while attending Wesleyan University during their freshman year.

They experimented with noise rock and electronica before settling on what has been called shape-shifting psychedelic pop.

The band formed under the name The Management, and two demo albums -We (Don't) Care and Climbing to New Lows - were unofficially released under the name, but since the name was already being used by another band, they later changed it to the abbreviated version MGMT.

         

Brand Names and Generic Nouns and Verbs

Do you call any small adhesive bandage a band-aid? Do you call a paper facial tissue a kleenex? If so, you are using a brand as a generic noun.

Band-Aid is a brand name of Johnson & Johnson's line of adhesive bandages and has been used since the 1920s. Kleenex is the brand name for a variety of paper-based products, such as facial tissue, bathroom tissue, paper towels, tampons, and diapers. It has also been in usage since the 1920s and is now part of Kimberly-Clark.

Some brand names become the vernacular word for an entire category. Going back to when a category emerges, sometimes one brand is dominant and so becomes the generic. Such was the case for refrigerators. 60 years ago it was fairly common for people to call any refrigerator a "fridge." That might seem like a shortening of refrigerator, but it actually was a shortening of the Frigidaire brand which early on dominated the market.

Some of these generic nouns are more likely to be used by an older generation that grew up hearing them. Would a young child say fridge, kleenex or band-aid? If so, it was probably learned from a parent or grandparent.

Is this a good thing for a brand? Yes and no. It certainly gets a brand name out into the public consciousness. The usage probably indicates, at some point in time, a dominance in the market. But when people use your brand name but actually are referring to (or purchasing!) another company's product, that weakens your brand and trademark. Generic nouns drop the capitalization of a product and at least that should distinguish that usage from the actual brand.

In the mid-20th century, the brand Xerox became the generic term for a photocopy. "I only have a xerox of the invoice." It even was used for a time as a verb for the process - "Make me a xerox of this document." The Xerox corporation was once fairly well known for opposing this usage and would contact publications that used lowercase "xerox" as a noun or verb and did not mean an actual Xerox copy or copy machine made by their company. That is required for trademark protection, and it can become a legal issue. Nowadays, with many other copiers in the market, it is likely that we would simply say "make a copy of this document." You might say that this indicates that the Xerox brand dominance has diminished.

The word "dumpster"goes back to 1935 when the Dempster-Dumpster system of mechanically loading the contents of standardized containers onto garbage trucks was patented by Dempster Brothers.

The actual containers were called Dumpsters (capital D) which was a blend word of the verb "dump" and the company's name. The company also made the Dempster Dumpmaster, which was the first successful front-loading garbage truck.

No doubt you have seen these trucks and these containers and have used the word as a genericized trademark. But most companies try hard to protect a trademark so that the word is used for their own products and services. It is a tough cultural battle. Generic nouns have a life of their own and often spread like a meme.

Some generic brand name nouns also are used as verbs. Such was the case with Xerox and in more modern usage, it is the case with Google. Way back in the late 1990s before Google was even a company, co-founder Larry Page used the word as a verb meaning "to search." This was when the search engine was still located at google.stanford.edu.

At one time, you might have said you were going to "google it" when you were actually going to search online using Yahoo, AltaVista or any one of the other competing search engines. But Google's search dominance is so great that today it's very likely that the person is using Google to google (search). In 2003, the American Dialect Society called google a transitive verb, and the Oxford English Dictionary made it official in June 2006.

P.U.

How did "P.U." get to be used to mean that something smelled bad?

Though it is sometimes spelled "piu," I always hear it pronounced as "pee-yew" with the two syllables often stretched out - and perhaps accompanied by a inched nose.

It is not an expression that is used as much these days. I associate it with my mother's generation. But actually, it is a lot older than that.

In the 1600s, the expression of a foul odor was pyoo. But English spelling had not become standardized, so this expression of disgust was also written as pue, peugh, pew and pue - but always pronounced as pyü. In our time, P.U. is the more common spelling.

This expression's root igoes back to the Indo-European word pu meaning to rot or decay. It is a shortened version of puteo, which is Latin for "to stink, to smell bad."