kodak, v.

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Sun Jul 8 15:26:23 UTC 2012


At 7/7/2012 07:36 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>I did a paper on genericide awhile back for
>presentation in Rochester, and I found a lot of
>instances of "kodaking".  The OED entry includes
>some from the late 19th century:
>
>Kodak, v. Now rare.
>...
>The history of this verb is now being repeated
>by another Rochester product; when I was in grad
>school, we "xeroxed" our papers, but--more
>likely because of the rise of competition than
>because of Xerox's campaign (with slogans like
>"you can't xerox a xerox on a Xerox/but you can
>copy a copy on a Xerox©™ copier") my current
>grad students just call it "copying".  Just goes
>to show that death by genericide, unlike the
>case of other -cides, isn't always permanent.

And "to kodak" may also disappear, just like its
original and its film.  Do we yet have "to nikon", "to canon", "to sony", etc?

Joel

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