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."

Clockwork Orange

Probably best known as the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, the title began with a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess.

In the novel, a clockwork orange refers to a person who "has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State."

The novel and film asks what is "goodness" and whether it makes sense to use aversion therapy to stop immoral behaviour. Director Stanley Kubrick, writing in Saturday Review, described the film as being "A social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioural psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots."

A clockwork orange is a person who is robotic behaviorally, but one that is, in all other respects, human.

The novel was also adapted as A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music in 1987 in a theatrical adaptation by Anthony Burgess.

Clockwork Orange was also the name of a supposed 1970s operation to discredit British politicians.

"Clockwork Orange" is a nickname for the Glasgow Subway in Glasgow, Scotland.

"Clockwork Orange" was a nickname for the Dutch national football team in the early 1970s.

Wendy Carlos's Complete Original Score

Pseudonyms: Criminals

It seems that many major criminals either take on pseudonyms (aliases) or have them assigned to them.

The Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) was assigned his pseudonym from the FBI acronym for UNiversities and Airline Bomber.

New York Police discovered in 1977 a handwritten letter near the bodies of two victims that was addressed to a NYPD Captain. In the letter, the killer referred to himself as "Son of Sam" for the first time. The press had previously dubbed the killer "the .44 Caliber Killer" because it was the weapon of choice for serial killer David Berkowitz.

Here are some of the better known criminal pseudonyms and their owners.

• Al Capone was really Alphonse Gabriel Capone
• Baby Face Nelson (Lester Joseph Gillis; also used the alias George Nelson)
• Billy the Kid (William H. Bonney; born William Henry McCarty, Jr.)
• Black Bart (Charles Earl Bowles)
• Bugsy Siegel (Benjamin Siegelbaum)

• Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker) and The Sundance Kid (Harry Alonzo Longabaugh)
• Carlos the Jackal (Ilich Ramírez Sánchez)
• Dutch Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer)
• Green River Killer (Gary Leon Ridgway)
• The Happy Face Killer (Keith Hunter Jesperson)
• Hillside Strangler was the collective pseudonym used for for two serial killers, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi.
• The Iceman (Richard Kuklinski)
• The I-5 Killer (Randall Woodfield)
• Legs Diamond (Jack Diamond)
• Lucky Luciano (Salvatore Lucania)
• Machine Gun Kelly (George Celino Barnes)
• Murf the Surf (Jack Roland Murphy)
• Ned Kelly (Edward Kelly)
• The Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez)
• Pretty Boy Floyd (Charles Arthur Floyd)
• Sara Jane Olson (Kathleen Soliah)
• The Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliffe)

We currently do not have real names to attach to some pseudonyms, including from the distant past:  the still unsolved Jack the Ripper murderer  - and the more modern Zodiac Killer.

Bombogenesis and bomb cyclone

Today the East Coast of the U.S. was hit with a big snowstorm and terms like bombogenesis and bomb cyclone were all over the news and social media. They sound like made-up media terms, like snowmageddon or snowpocalypse, but they are legitimate meteorological terms.

These terms were new to me but have been in use by meteorologists since at least 1980. The winter storm in March 1993 that was called the Storm of the Century was also a bomb cyclone. Social media has made bombogenesis and bomb cyclone part of our winter vocabulary.

But why "bomb?" That term comes because, like a bomb, the storm's pressure has to drop at least 24 millibars in less than 24 hours. That marks how quickly a storm strengthens.

The more familiar cyclones of tropical temperatures feed off patches of warm ocean water. But a winter bomb cyclone is from colliding air masses. You might hear it called a "winter hurricane" but meteorologists usually avoid that name.

And why "genesis?"  Bombogenesis refers more specifically to a bomb storm's development or "genesis." First the genesis, then the cyclone.