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.

Cassandra Complex

Cassandra by 

Evelyn De Morgan - Wikimedia

The Cassandra complex is the name given to a phenomenon where people who predict bad news or warnings are ignored or outright dismissed.

For our origin story, we go back to Greek mythology. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the king who reigned over Troy when the Greeks attacked it.

Cassandra was so beautiful that she attracted the attention of the god Apollo, the son of Zeus. He gave her the gift of prophecy, but she refused his attentions. This made Apollo angry and, like all those ancient gods, he took revenge. He cursed Cassandra so that even though she could make truthful prophecies, no one would ever believe her.

In the Old Testament, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Amos were all prophets who tried to warn people of what they saw as wrong in their society. But people didn’t believe them, and they ended up being punished for their prophecies.

The term "Cassandra complex" entered the lexicon in 1949 when a French philosopher discussed the potential for someone to predict future events. This complex has found its way into usage in psychology, the circus, the corporate world, environmentalism and philosophy.

Psychologists use the term "Cassandra complex" to apply to people who suffer feel humiliated because they are never being listened to or believed when they try and explain themselves to other people.

Defunct Basketball Team Names

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional men's basketball league, currently consisting of 30 teams in North America (29 in the United States and one in Canada).

The league began in New York City in 1946, as the Basketball Association of America (BAA). It adopted the name National Basketball Association (NBA) at the start of the 1949–50 season when it absorbed the National Basketball League (NBL).

At some point we will have posted about all the NBA teams' name origins. Some of them are fairly obvious; some are not. But an interesting side note is the now defunct basketball teams and their name origins.

There have been 15 defunct NBA franchises.

One of those defunct teams and names is the Providence Steamrollers. They were a BAA team based in Providence, Rhode Island. They were one of the original eleven Basketball Association of America teams, and they posted an all-time record of 46–122 (.274) before folding after three seasons.

The Steamrollers still hold the dubious NBA record for the fewest games won in a season with six, in the 1947–48 season.

During the 1947–48 season, the Steamrollers' coach Nat Hickey activated himself as a player for one game two days before his 46th birthday, setting a still-standing record as the oldest player in NBA history.

The team took its name from the NFL franchise that was also called the Providence Steamrollers. They won the NFL championship in 1928 and are the last NFL champion to no longer be in the league. The Providence Steam Roller (also referred to as the Providence Steam Rollers, the Providence Steamroller and the Providence Steamrollers) were a football  team from 1925 to 1931. Providence was the first New England team to win an NFL championship. Most of their home games were played in the small 10,000-seat stadium that was built for bicycle races called the Cycledrome.

The Providence team was established in 1916 by two staffers at the Providence Journal - sports-editor Charles Coppen and part-time sports-writer Pearce Johnson. During halftime of one game, Charles Coppen heard a spectator remark that the opposing Providence team was "getting steam-rolled." He liked that remark so much that he named his team the Steam Roller.

As of this writing, the Steamrollers remain the last professional sports franchise from one of the Big Four leagues to be based in Rhode Island.

One defunct team whose name has survived is the Denver Nuggets. The original Nuggets joined the NBL for the 1948–49 season, and then joined the NBA after the merger for the 1949–50 season. The Nuggets were the first major professional sports franchise in Colorado, and the first NBA franchise west of the Mississippi.

In 1950, the Nuggets were one of seven teams, including Anderson Packers, Chicago Stags, Sheboygan Red Skins, St. Louis Bombers, Washington Capitols, Waterloo Hawks, that dropped out of the National Basketball Association altogether.

When the Denver Rockets of the American Basketball Association (ABA) joined the NBA, a contest was held in 1974 to give the team a new nickname since the NBA already had the Houston Rockets. The "Nuggets" name, which referenced Colorados days of gold mining for nuggets, was selected for the new team.

The current Denver Nuggets also started out in the same venue as the original Nuggets, the Denver Auditorium Arena, playing there from 1967 to 1975. They now play their home games at Pepsi Center, which they share with the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League (NHL) and the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League (NLL).

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.

Sports Teams Names

Besides all the jargon of sports, many names of teams have unusual origins, and many terms in sports come from names. Here are some team name origins for hockey, football and baseball.

In the National Hockey League, the Anaheim Mighty Ducks got their name from Disney CEO Michael Eisner who named the team after the hit Disney hockey movie The Mighty Ducks.

When Businessman Charles Adams wanted his new franchise to have brown and yellow team colors to match his stores, and a name equated with strength and power, he ran a contest and the winning fan entry was the Boston Bruins in the early days featuring a bear/bruin.

The Buffalo team management held a contest and chose Sabres as fitting since team officials wanted a name not being used in the pros and something other than a buffalo/bison variation.

When the Flames were located in Atlanta, the name referenced the burning of the city in the Civil War. When the team moved to Calgary, management held a contest and the fans chose to keep the Flames name. The flame could now be considered a reference to Alberta's petroleum industry.

In the National Football League, when George Halas moved his oddly-named Decatur Staleys to Chicago in 1921, the Staleys played at Wrigley Field, the home of baseball’s Cubs. Halas thought that if the baseball tenants were Cubs, then his more rugged gridiron combatants should be known as the Bears.

Paul Brown chose Bengals as the team name for Cincinnati’s 1968 AFL expansion team because there had been earlier football teams in the city called the Bengals. The oldest Bengals were members of an earlier AFL in 1937, then competed as an independent club in 1938, then played in a new AFL from 1939-41 before the AFL merged with the NFL.

The Buffalo Bills nickname refers to William F. Cody, who was known as “Buffalo Bill.” Buffalo had a football team called the Bisons, but the city’s minor league baseball and hockey teams also had the same name. The football team held a contest to select a new nickname following the 1946 season. More than 4,500 entries were submitted and Bills beat out Bullets, Nickels and Blue Devils.

           

In Major League Baseball, one team name example is the 1961 expansion version of the Washington Senators, who were obviously named for the U.S. Senate in Washington D.C.

When they moved to Arlington, Texas in 1972, they took on the totally-Texas nickname Texas Rangers, referencing the famous Texas Ranger Division, the law enforcement agency that was created by Stephen F. Austin in 1823.

The aptly named Colorado Rockies became a new franchise into the MLB in 1993. The nickname "Rockies" is, of course, a reference to the Rocky Mountains which cover much of the western half of Colorado. The name Colorado Rockies had actually already been used by a National Hockey League team from 1976-1982. When that team relocated, they became the New Jersey Devils.

            

Minor league teams had been known as the Miami Marlins for several decades, referencing the marlin, a popular sport fish of the state. There were the Miami Marlins of the International League (1956-1960) and the Miami club of the Florida State League starting in 1963, who was known as the Miami Marlins during 1963-1970 and then again in 1982-1988.

The MLB team began to play as an expansion team in the 1993 season as the Florida Marlins When the major leagues expanded to the Miami area in 1993, the old nickname was revived but called by the state name of Florida Marlins. The Marlins moved into their new ballpark, Marlins Park, in 2012 which coincided with a change in the team colors/uniforms and name to the Miami Marlins.

The Marlins are the only team to win a World Series in their first two winning seasons (1997 and 2003); in fact, they are the only team to even make the playoffs in their first two winning seasons. In those two seasons, they managed to make a surprise run to the World Series, both times as heavy underdogs. They are also the only team to never lose a postseason series.

Check out all our sports names posts.

Head Honcho

"Head honcho" is a casual or unofficial reference to a person in charge of a community or an organization.

I would have guessed that the word had a Spanish origin but it actually comes from a Japanese term. The word would be spelled the same if you translate using the English alphabet. It is a geographic region near Tokyo, but roughly translated, a honchō  referring to a person in Japan is a leader or squad leader.

I have been told that you might easily see signs in Japan that would mean honchō  and that they would probably indicate a place name with this translation meaning "main town."

The "head honcho" in your office is likely to not officially be a boss but bosses everyone else around. This informal use of honcho seems to have been brought into American English slang in the 1940s to mean "officer in charge," and was popular with U.S. soldiers during the Korean War.

In the early 1950s, Gerald Ford declined offers to run for either the Senate or the Michigan governorship, instead aiming for Speaker of the House, which he called "the ultimate achievement. To sit up there and be the head honcho of 434 other people and have the responsibility, aside from the achievement, of trying to run the greatest legislative body in the history of mankind."

Unusual Origin Stories of Patron Saints

This post originally appeared on another blog of mine, One-Page Schoolhouse.  It is about some of the unusual origin stories of some patron saints.

A patron saint is one who in Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or particular branches of Islam, is regarded as the heavenly advocate of a nation, place, craft, activity, class, clan, family or person.

Saint Drogo by TheoJunior, on Flickr

There are some very odd Saints in the long list of Saints. For example, Saint Drogo (I know the convention is to abbreviate "Saint" as St., but that also means "street" and I don't want to offend any saints, just in case) is the patron saint of unattractive people and somehow also of coffeehouses.

More amazing is that Drogo was said to be able to bilocate - to maintain his actual presence in two totally different places at the same time. Witnesses claimed seeing Drogo working in fields simultaneously, and going to Mass. If that is true, I'd make him a saint for being able to be "in two places at once" rather than for being unattractive due to an affliction. That disfiguring affliction turned him into a recluse. I can find no connection to coffee and actually found that Drogo only drank warm water during his years as a recluse.

Saint Giles was said to have lived as a hermit in the south of France in the later 7th century and stayed alive on the milk of a female deer. How do you milk deer? Anyway, not only is he the patron saint of the city of Edinburgh, but also the patron saint of breastfeeding.

Saint Balthasar is traditionally considered to be one of the biblical Magi (AKA The Three Wise Men or the Three Kings) who visited Jesus in the stable at his birth. As the King of Arabia, he brought the gift of myrrh. (Extra Trivia: Myrrh is a natural gum or resin extracted from a number of small, thorny tree species and used as a perfume, incense, and medicine.) At that time, Africa was frequently equated with Egypt. Some Romani sideshow merchants and entertainers were (mistakenly) thought to have come from Egypt (that is where the corruption of Egypt leads to GYPsies). Therefore, rather unfairly, this Egyptian king became the patron saint of playing card manufacturers.

One depiction of St. Julian murdering his parents
- from a larger panel of art by Ansano Ciampanti

My favorite unusual origin story is Saint Julian the Hospitaller.

Most of the Saints get tagged as "patrons" for a number of things. Julian is attached to clowns and circus workers, innkeepers, fiddle players, jugglers, childless people - and murderers. What a mishmash of things for a Saint.

How does a Saint get associated with murder? In this case, because he was a murderer. (Though the church would clarify this as a "repentant murderer.").

His story is a variation on the classical Oedipus Rex, which he apparently had not read or he didn't learn a lesson from it.

Julian was cursed (by a hart, just to make the story even weirder) that he would kill his parents. So that this would not come to be, he left home and traveled far away to live his life. He lives this distant life, acquires his own castle, and a wife.

But his parents are desperately searching for their lost son, and they finally found his castle. Julian was away on a hunt, but his wife (who I guess didn't know about the curse) welcomed her in-laws and honored them by putting them up in their master bedroom.

While his wife is at church, Julian comes home, finds the couple sleeping in his dark bedroom, assumes that it is his wife with another man, and kills both of them.

He fulfills the curse, but is obviously wracked with guilt. In order to get salvation, he (and his wife) build an inn for travelers, and a hospital for the poor and other charitable works. He was forgiven for his crime when he gave help to a leper who turned out to be a messenger from God who had been sent to test him.

He is the patron of hotel keepers, travelers, boatmen and murderers - at least the repentant ones.

Some Lost Words of the Winter Season

This is a topic that I am more likely to write about on this blog than any of my other blogs, but it first appeared on my Weekends in Paradelle site.

It is about words of the winter season that seem to have gotten lost over the years. An article on the quite wonderful mentalfloss.com website calls a group of words "obsolete Christmas words," but I think most of them are more winter season words. Because they are English (Modern, Middle or Old) and German, they tend to be associated with the Yule or Christmas season.

I probably won't be drinking wassail this month. That is a beverage of hot mulled cider, drunk traditionally as an integral part of wassailing, which was a Medieval Christmastide English drinking ritual intended to ensure a good cider apple harvest the following year. (I may very well down a few hard ciders though, so hopefully that will please the apple gods.) Wassail probably comes from a Germanic phrase meaning “good health" and was a greeting.

One word that is totally new to me comes from Latin. You can say that it looks ninguid outside when the landscape is snow-covered.

You all know that to hibernate means sleeping throughout the entire winter. It is something animals do - not people, though some of us seem to hibernate. But some of you probably do hiemate (which my spellcheck is not happy with) which means to spend winter somewhere.

Actually, searching online for hiernate turned up nothing, so I kind of wonder about the validity of these words. Are they so lost that even Google can't find them? For example, doesn't the term "yule-hole" seem fake or very modern? It supposedly means the hole you need to move your belt to after you’ve eaten a massive meal. And yet, going back to the 1500s, the terms belly-cheer or belly-timber was used for fine food and somewhat gluttonous eating that may occur in winter and around holiday celebrations from Thanksgiving through New Year's and into those stay-at-home days of February too.

If you give a tip when you're at the bar for your drinks, that can be called a pourboire. The word comes from French and literally means "for drink.”

Many of us give or get gift cards and money as a present. To distinguish a thing that is a gift (or present) from one that is money given in lieu of the traditional object gift, the term "present-silver" has been around since the 1500s.

Another word that is brand new to me but old is xenium. It sounds like a new drug or tech company, but it means a gift that is given to a houseguest, or a gift given by a guest to their host.

Do you know nog, a word that comes from ancient English ales but still shows up in words we use during the season, such as eggnog.

While you are celebrating, keep in mind "apolausticism," a long-lost 19th-century word derived from Greek meaning "to enjoy," that describes the total devotion to enjoying yourself.

And after you totally enjoy yourself, a word that looks and sounds just right is crapulence. The OED tells us that this 18th-century word describes “sickness or indisposition resulting from excess in drinking or eating.”

Super Bowl Teams 2019

In 2019, Super Bowl LIII will take place at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, home of the Atlanta Falcons. This is the first Super Bowl hosted at the stadium, which opened in 2017, but this is the third Super Bowl that has been played in Atlanta. The Cowboys beat the Bills in the Georgia Dome in 1994 Super Bowl XXVIII. The Rams topped the Titans in 2000 in Super Bowl XXXIV.

This season's AFC Championship game was the New England Patriots versus the Kansas City Chiefs with the Pats coming out on top in overtime.

The NFC Championship game pitted the Los Angeles Rams against the New Orleans Saints in another overtime game where the Rams triumphed.

This year's Super Bowl is a rematch of Super Bowl XXXVI, in which the Patriots, led by second-year head coach Bill Belichick and backup quarterback Tom Brady, defeated the heavily favored Rams, who played in St. Louis at the time, on a last-second field goal.

Click each the team names on this post for origin stories on all these football teams.

Los Angeles Rams

The Los Angeles Rams are a professional American football team based in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and play their home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Rams compete in the National Football League (NFL), as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) West division.



The franchise began in 1936 as the Cleveland Rams, located in Cleveland, Ohio. The team was founded by Ohio attorney Homer Marshman and player-coach Damon Wetzel, a former Ohio State star who also played briefly for the Chicago Bears and Pittsburgh Pirates.  The team's name choice - which sounds like it might be a team from a mountainous location rather than Cleveland - was rather arbitrary. Wetzel, who served as general manager, selected the "Rams", because his favorite college football team was the Fordham Rams from Fordham University, though Marshman also liked the name choice.

That team was part of the newly formed American Football League and finished the 1936 regular season in second place behind the league champion Boston Shamrocks.

After winning the 1945 NFL Championship Game, the franchise moved to Los Angeles, California in 1946, making way for the Cleveland Browns of the All-America Football Conference, and becoming the only NFL championship team to play the following season in another city.



The team made another move after the 1994 NFL season, leaving California and relocating in St. Louis, Missouri.

Five seasons after relocating, the team won Super Bowl XXXIV in a 23–16 victory over the Tennessee Titans. They appeared again in Super Bowl XXXVI, where they lost 20–17 to the New England Patriots.



At the end of the 2015 NFL season, the team filed notice with the NFL of its intent to move yet again. pursue a relocation back to Los Angeles. The move was approved by owners, and in January 2016 the Rams returned to Los Angeles for the 2016 NFL season.






The Rams franchise has won three NFL championships and is the only franchise to win championships while representing three different cities (Cleveland in 1945, Los Angeles in 1951, and St. Louis in 1999).

Atlanta Falcons

The Atlanta Falcons franchise began on June 30, 1965, when the NFL granted ownership to Rankin Smith Sr. who paid $8.5 million, the highest price in NFL history at the time for a franchise.

The Atlanta team received its nickname in August when Julia Elliott was selected from many people who suggested "Falcons" as the nickname for the new franchise. She wrote: "the Falcon is proud and dignified, with great courage and fight. It never drops its prey. It is deadly and has a great sporting tradition."

But professional football first came to Atlanta in 1962, when the American Football League (AFL) staged two preseason contests, and in 1964 when  the AFL held another exhibition game. In 1965, after the Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium (then known simply as Atlanta Stadium) was built, the city of Atlanta felt the time was right to start pursuing professional football.

Several groups independently applied for franchises in both the AFL and NFL. Some local businessmen were awarded an AFL franchise contingent upon acquiring exclusive stadium rights from city officials. That motivated the NFL to get serious and forced Atlanta officials to make a choice between the two leagues. They went with the NFL.

The NFL had planned to add two teams in 1967, but the competition with the AFL for Atlanta forced Atlanta to be added a year early in 1966. The second expansion team, the New Orleans Saints, joined the NFL as planned in 1967 as its sixteenth franchise.