kodak, v.

[Laurence Horn]

On Jul 8, 2012, at 11:26 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> 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?
>
My hypothesis is that once the competitors enter the fray as valid alternatives, the generic use of the eponymic verb will decline, so you'd never get "to nikon" or "to canon" unless those products really dominated the field.  So if my new search engine Larry acquired the market share now occupied by Google (if a product people don't pay for directly can be said to have a market share), we might refer to "larrying" something, "auto-larrying", "larry-gaengers", and so on.  Well, maybe not "larry-gaengers".   But if people just larried half the time and googled the other half, neither verb would last, we'd just call it "searching" or the like, the way we do with copiers.   Eponymic nouns are different; we have no hesitation referring to tissues made by Scott or Puffs or whoever as kleenex.  At least I don't.  I think I'm less likely to call bleach "Clorox" as a generic than I used to be, though.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org