Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

Mark J. Reed wrote:

>On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 11:05:37AM -0500, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
>
>>Strange.  You Aussies seem to be more prone to making trademarks common
>>nouns than we Americans.  :-)
>>
>>
>
>Well, since when I'm sick I tend to lie around on the "sofa" with a big box of
>"kleenex" and a bottle of "aspirin",  I wouldn't jump to that conclusion.
>The Aussies do seem to have been doing more of it more recently, though.  :)
>
Well, have you ever taken a trademark and warped it? ('Doona' < Feduna,
a German company who imported duvets---doonas---into Melbourne some time
ago who no-one's heard of. It is obviously a Melburnianism, rather than
an Australianism.)

And when I take a train, tram or bus, I have to validate my metcard.
Which is okay, because it's the same ticket, so it's still a
Metcard-metcard. But any electronically-validated public transport
ticket (i.e. from other states/countries) is a metcard too. (In this
case, Metcard is a trademark owned by Metcard, who is owned by the
Public Transport Corporation, who is owned by the State Government, so I
guess it's ours to begin with.)

And coke, much to the Coca-Cola Company's chagrin, means any cola. I'm
not sure how unusual that one is, but I've seen all sorts of odd
explanations for the Southern use of coke that it might be worth
pointing out. (Recently and temporarily, Coca-Cola bottles had 'Coke'
written on them were normally they'd have Coca-Cola. I don't know how
widespread that was.)

Then there's things like Dettol where you call it Dettol but also
expected it to *be* Dettol. Tim-Tams were in that class, but since
Arnotts got bought by Campbells and all those companies have brought out
their equivalents, you can modify Tim-Tam to refer to non-Tim-Tam
Tim-Tams (e.g. Home Brand Tim-Tams, Tim-Tam equivalents etc.), but
without the modification, they do refer to the proper things.

ObConlang: How many conculture-having conlangs do this? :)

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

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