FRIGIDAIRE and KLEENEX (was ICE BOX)

[Wilson Gray]

On Mar 1, 2005, at 3:44 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: FRIGIDAIRE and KLEENEX (was ICE BOX)
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> At 12:21 PM -0500 3/1/05, ronbutters at AOL.COM wrote:
>> the issue is nor just what people say but what they KNOW. IT seems
>> clear to me that most people know that KLEENEX is a brand name and
>> that it is merely used by speakers in a shorthand way to refer to
>> paper tissues (toilet tissue is a compound, by the way).
>
> But is this really any different from knowing that "drink" sometimes
> denotes an imbibable liquid and sometimes an imbibable alcoholic
> liquid?  Or that "color" can include or exclude black and white?  Or
> that "guys" can pick out males sometimes but be gender-nonspecific
> other times, and so can "gays"?  Or that _Frau_ in German and _femme_
> in French may pick out women in general or just wives?  Or that a
> Yankee is anyone from the U.S., or more specifically someone from the
> northern states, or more specifically someone from New England, or...?
>
> Isn't this just the garden variety autohyponymy that often results
> from broadening and narrowing? What (most) English speakers know, I
> submit, is that "Kleenex" is a name for a certain brand of tissue and
> also that it's a generic essentially equivalent to "tissue"; what
> they know about "Scotties" and "Puffs" is that they have the former
> sort of meaning and not the latter.  There is a case to made for some
> of these distinctions involving uses rather than senses, but I think
> with most of those derived generics the line has been crossed.   (And
> to respond to the question, there are at least some google hits for
> "Canon xerox machines", "Scotties kleenex", "Curad band-aids", and
> the like, while in other cases--"kitty litter", "crock pot",
> "spackle"--any knowledge of the brand name origin of the generic has
> essentially disappeared from the speech community.)
>
> larry
>

I was caught completely off-guard when I discovered that "Kitty Litter"
was a brand name. I'd been using the name generically for years. And I
learned "kodak" - the kind of kodak that we used was the oddly-named
"Brownie" - a long time, at least a decade, before I learned the word
"camera."

-Wilson