COKE in the South

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 3/2/05 9:46:09 PM, stalker at MSU.EDU writes:


> >
> 
> I like this.  Southerners, who use Coke generically,(note those
> non-restrictive clause commas) are aware of the legal sense of the term and
> are rejecting it.  Does this correlate with the "save your Dixie cups; the
> South will rise again: syndrome?
> 
> Jim
> 
COKE is an important example, and In thank Jim for reminding me of it and 
making me give it some more thought.

JIm's nonrestrictive clause commas are wrong, but it would be difficult to 
maintain that the shorthand use of "cokes" by SOME Southerners sometimes borders 
on the generic. In my experience after living nearly 40 years in North 
Carolina (I haven't checked this against any empirical data), there are SOME people 
who use "cokes" (almost always in the plural) to refer to soft drinks in 
general, though they are fading out in areas where the large number of immigrants 
from the North are often confused by such utterances as, "What kind of cokes do 
y'all have?" Most frequently, it seems to me, there use is plural.

I didn't mean to suggest that there may not be some examples of partial 
genericide still underway in contemporary culture. TRAMPOLINE is a fairly recent 
example of a term that lost its trademark status. THERMOS is another that has 
some kind of borderline status. Sometimes words do indeed undergo what the 
lawyers call GENERICIDE, and maybe COKE has done this for some people: COKE(S) may 
have some kind of double-meaning for some people, i.e., a dictionary that 
properly describes COKE for some Southerners might should have entry #1 for the 
trademark status and #2 for the generic use. But such people are a decided 
minority in the US, and I suspect that they are dying out in the face of dialect 
mixture and, of course, modern advertising. And, no, they are not "rejecting" 
the specific association of COKE with COCA COLA, though they may be making a 
parallel use of the word. Note that this process is not peculiar to trademarks. 
For example, "french" is sometimes used as a verb meaning 'kiss with the mouth 
open and the tongue protruding'. But people who say, "Tom frenched Tony" are 
not thereby "rejecting" the association (of the phonemic sequence found in 
"french") with the proper noun "French."

Obviously, there is something of a genericide continuum for trademarks and 
erstwhile trademarks from true generics (aspirin) to trademarks that are never 
used generically. Again, all I am suggesting is that it behooves us as 
linguists and lexicographers to use terminology that reflects the linguistic knowledge 
of native speakers as accurately and fully as possible.