®.I.P. Zipper (1925-1930) Epitaph file 01

®.I.P. Epitaph series 01 Trademarks that unfortunately lost its effect.

Zipper is now common and indispensable fastening item in clothing, luggage, camping and sports goods. It can fasten two edges of materials or flexible items by clasping metal or plastic teeth together. Not many people know that the word "zipper" was once a trademark (I did not know until recently).

The item was invented by an American inventor Whitcomb Judson in 1893, but the product name was not as is now, it was then called a "clasp locker".

The trademark "Zipper", and "Zipper Boots" were first registered by B. F. Goodrich Company in 1925. They used the fastening item in their rubber boots.

The word 'zip' was already in the English vocabulary since the late 19th century as onomatopoeic noun and verb, meaning the sound of a fast moving item or the act of moving very fast. It is said that an executive of B. F. Goodrich Company used to slide the fastener up and down saying "zip 'er up", and the trademark "Zipper" was made.

In 1930, the company sued to protect the trademark but lost, and the word Zipper became just a generic 'zipper'. Genericide victim...

In 1936, a new verb 'to zip' meaning to 'zipper up' something joined the dictionary. And of course because it is a new verb, it inflects in regular form (why it is a regular verb); zip, zipping, zipped, not zap.

Reproducting words

Observing the case ("Love being drunk"), it is perhaps natural to find out that the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) records plentiful ways of describing the fundamental act of human being, a copulation. There are obviously myriads of the expressions regarding the sexual behaviour, and the thesaurus records 67 variations under the subcategory of “having sexual intercourse.”

The first citation is “play” from Old English poem: as an intransitive verb in a sense of “ engaging in amorous play, to make love; to have sexual intercourse with.” 

“ming” (mingle) is the earliest example of a transitive verb in a sense of “causing to associate (sometimes spec. in sexual intercourse); to unite in marriage”

One of the most common four letter words appears in the 16th century, although the record is found further back in the part of surname like “Fukkebotere” (c1290) or “Fuckebegger” (1287). The recent inventions are "bonk" (transitive 1975) and "shack" (intransitive 1976).

Looking through the list, what caught my eyes is that there are a number of basic common verbs that began to take on such sexual meaning. For example, even up to the end of 14th century, the following transitive verb seems to have carried the note:

“have” (OE)“know” (c. 1200) “touch” (c. 1384)“deal” (a. 1387)“use” (a. 1387) “take” (c. 1390) 

The meaning of words in OED is of course ascertained by modern researchers and lexicographers, so that grasping them depends heavily on how they interpret and understand the context of the work. Nonetheless, it is interesting to observe that many common verbs turned to assume the sexual nuance. The semantic application implies the importance of and accessibility to “bedding” (c. 1315). 

Genericide terminal ward - near to death trademarks

There are a lot more victims like Google and Photoshop. I will list here the casualties of genericide. These are trademarks that are protected but still are used as generic word; they are in serious condition, nearly dead... You could say that this entry is the terminal ward of trademarks. I have listed ones that are used not just in English but in Japanese too. It shows how pandemic the generification is.

Band-Aid

Trademark of Johnson and Johnson, first appeared in market in 1920. Its generic name is adhesive bandage.

Ping-Pong

Trademark of Jaques of London, now passed to Parker Brothers. The generic name of the game is, of course, table tennis. In Japan, there was a popular comic with the title "Ping-Pong", and it was make into a film. In Japanese, Ping-Pong refers to a fun, non-sportive game of table tennis, where as 卓球(TAKKYU meaning table tennis) refers to more serious sports game.

Frisbee

Trademark of Wham-O, first appeared in market in 1957. The generic name is flying disc. The product became a skyrocketing hit for being used in a new type of sport.

Jeep

Trademark of Chrysler. The 4-wheel-drive utility vehicle first was used by the US Army in World War II. The civilian model came into the market in 1945. The generic name is SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle), and Chrysler has made advertisements to prevent the trademark to becoming a generic term (They invented "SUV" because they can't call them Jeep.)

Sellotape

Trademark of Sellotape. The generic name is clear adhesive tape. Sellotape appears in both trademark and generic word in dictionaries, and you could say the trademark is, in reality, dead.

These casualties are all result of world-wide popularity... Ironic, isn't it.

Love being "drunk"

Besides OED, the OED online offers an access to the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The huge volume of this thesaurus is first published in print in 2009 and became available online. It is a unique resource of the English language, utterly irresistible for word lovers, enabling users to narrow down the range of meanings of as many as 800,000 words, in 235,000 entry categories. It is unprecedented as it is not just a plain collection of synonyms but also “historical” records from Old English to the present-day English.

For example, the website offers an immediate access to the list of words related to “drunk.” In fact, a state of being “drunk” has produced the largest number of synonyms throughout the history of English: there are over 150 ways to refer to being “drunk”! Let’s take a brief overview of the synonyms from the beginning up to 15th century. The number in parentheses is the year first recorded, followed by the OED’s definition.

"Fordrunken" (c897) ---Drunk, overcome with drink.

"Drunken" (1050) ---Overcome by liquor; intoxicated; = drunk adj.

"cup-shotten" (c1330) --- cup-shot adj., being the earlier form.

"Drunk" (c1340) --- That has drunk intoxicating liquor to an extent which affects steady self-control; intoxicated, inebriated; overcome by alcoholic liquor.

"Inebriate" (1497) ---Inebriated, drunken; intoxicated (lit. and fig.). Often const. as pa. pple.

"Overseen" (c1500) ---Drunk, intoxicated. Freq. in overseen with drink (also wine,etc.). Obs. (Brit. regional in later use).

… and the number swells from the following century to more than a hundred! The latest entry is "rat-arsed" (drunk, intoxicated; = ratted), which appears in 1984.

From the number of these synonyms, it is easy to understand how much native speakers of English loves drinking! They have been in love wth drinking historically, creating so many different ways in describing their loving state over time.

This monumental achievement will open up a new perspective by which to look at English. The number of words reflects multiple expressions of human culture.   

You can read further related topic below,

https://newrepublic.com/article/118711/almost-complete-list-every-word-weve-ever-used-mean-drunk

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1231-crystal-drunk-words-oxford-english-dictionary-20141231-story.html

"I'm lookiting"

I used to collect "Peanuts" comic books when I was very young. It sort of became a rule in me to buy a new book when the family went on a holiday trip and read it through during the trip. I think I was about 8 when I started this, and I still have the books I got then.

There is one comic strip that I remember very clearly, and it happens to be about inflecting a new verb.

Charlie Brown's friend is jumping rope, and she wants him to look at her. Here is the comic strip.

(by Charles Schulz   Feb, 18th 1963)

"I'm lookiting!"

I found it very funny.

I liked the sound very much and I remember saying it over and over, I'm lookiting, I'm lookiting!

Lookit is 'look it', meaning to look at it. 

The little kids in Peanuts must be around 7. Children around that age have fairly good command of their mother tongue, but most of their knowledge of the language is acquired verbally, from 'strings of sounds'. Unlike written language, verbally produced language does not have any markers to tell where are the starts and ends of words or sentences. Then how can a child know when hearing a sentence if the verb contained is an intransitive or a phrasal verb or a transitive verb that needs an object?

It is very plausible that the children in that linguistic stage to make a rough guess about the word (in this case, verb) using the cues they get from the pauses and breaks of sound.

For the girl and Charlie, 'lookit' was one verb. She may have heard some grown-ups around her using it like "Oh, look it!" She uses it in imperative, Charlie uses it in present continuous form, although he has never heard it before. He applied the regular rule of forming a present continuous. It seems that Linus was the only one who knew that there was no such verb as 'lookit'.

Children cleverly and productively create maximum output from the minimum grammatical knowledge they have. Whenever they have no example to refer to, they go for the regular rule. 

George Orwell's linguistic spoof

George Orwell was a British writer who occasionally satirized contemporary overuse of polysyllabic loanwords. Simon Horobin (p. 60) cites his rendering of the Authorised version (King James Bible) alongside his own parodic translation of it into Modern English:

Ecclesiastes, Chapter 9, verse 11: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. 

Orwell’s version:Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

The former is a plain sentence, full of monosyllabic words, while Orwell’s latter version virtually contains none of them. His is extremely long, made up of only one sentence. At first glance, the sense each passage makes looks different, yet what is essentially conveyed is the same. By altering the sentence into something grander, Orwell mocks perhaps the unnecessary effort by the contemporary.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language also cites the passages and other ones from his essay Politics and the English Language (1946), in which it notes that Orwell particularly disliked the words like: 

expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous...

“Predict” is a pretty usual word nowadays, but others are indeed not used in daily conversations. Yet, I clearly remember that, when reading his novel 1984, I came across “clandestine” and I thought you wrote it here!

Works Cited

Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP, 2003.

Horobin, Simon. How English Became English: A Short History of a Global Language. Oxford University Press, 2016.