In response to @running_coach 's picture:
D’oh! I didn’t fully read your other posts. My bad.
Huh. There’s an implication there that the letters in an acronym must be pronounced as they were pronounced in the words from which they’re drawn. Am I understand you correctly?
Yeah, the words take a life of their own once they enter the wild. Like I said in another thread, “adidasy” has become the generic colloquial word for gym/tennis shoes/sneakers/trainers/etc and has been for decades. To an American ear, calling a Nike a pair of “Adidases” sounds quite odd, but in Polish, sounds perfectly fine. I’m sure all sorts of quirks like these can be found when words and brandnames enter the local language and even within the same language, depending on dialect, words may be analyzed differently and hence, different plurals, different pronunciations, etc.
With the “graphical” example, that is indeed the argument many make, which doesn’t fly. For an analogous, but a bit more niche example, back in the late 80s, there was a graphical operating system for the C64 called “GEOS.” Guess how it was pronounced? With a “GEE’” not a “GHEE.” Guess what that “g” stands for? “Graphical.”
Going the other way, NASA has weather satellites called GOES satellites. Guess how that’s pronounced? Like the word “goes.” Guess was the “g” stands for. “Geo-stationary.”
What words the individual letters of an acronym stand for are irrelevant.
GIF is interesting because some people (like me) anaylize it with “gin,” “ginger,” “giraffe,” “giant,” “Gibraltar,” while others analyze it with “gift,” “girl,” “gig.” It’s legitimately ambiguous. (And I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that Doc’s “jiggawatts” in Back to the Future are “gigawatts” with the “gi” analyzed the first way.) The creator of GIFs happens to say it the same way I do, but popular usage dictates pronouncing it as “gift” without the “t” so that’s what I do now, or say something like “ghiff, jiff, whateverthehellyoucallit.”
When I was a child I only had one brick of LEGO, so that is what I played: I played LEGO with LEGO. It quickly got boring, I almost swallowed it by mistake. When we hit it rich some time later and my parents could finally afford whole sets of LEGOs (the plural refers to the boxes they are sold in, not the total number of bricks). I very much enjoyed the Legæ (or Legœ, depending on the gender of the thing I was assembling) until they got boring too.
Legos in Italian is also the plural of the LEGO set that is sold in a box.
This constant CAPITALAZING™ of a trademark® is grammatically frowned upon as an angry twitterism© and is to be banned under lock and key in Mar-a-LEGO for the foreseeable future. Or so we hope.
And some say that LEGO is an acronym of the Danish words leg godt that translate as “play well”. But playing in wells is dangerous, kids drown easily. Don’t play in wells at home.
1 sheep, 2 sheep…1 deer, 2 deer…1 faux pas, 2 faux pas.
I brought two Cokes. Maybe bottles of, cups of, cans of…Coke. I like to be mysterious. Two Cokes.
I have multiple brothers-in-law. Just ask the Attorneys General or Sergeants at Arms. I’m hoping to avoid courts martial.
Yet that batter had 100 runs batted in…shouldn’t that be RsBI, not RBIs? Don’t exceed 7,000 revolutions per minute with that engine…shouldn’t it be RsPM, not RPMs?
Plural of…
…alumna?
…corpus?
Opera is the plural of…
Graffiti is the plural of…
alumnae, corpora…opus, graffito
I’m flexible and willing to learn. But I’ve always called them LEGOs.
I would say “bits of Lego” - unless I stand on them in bare feet, in which case quite other words might be used.
The definitive word on the pronunciation of “gif”
Very cool. Goes over all those points with numbers, too!
Trademark owners do not own words. They own trademark rights. They have no legal or moral control over language.
We have addressed this many times.
Trademark law is not a regulation of speech in general. For example, the Lego company would love it if you said “Lego-brand toy blocks” all the time and only in reference to their legitimately branded blocks and avoided calling them “Legos,” and especially avoided calling someone else’s blocks “legos” in a generic sense.
But you can do it all day every day for the rest of your life. You can even write a book that does it. A newspaper can go around printing “Legos” and “legos” all it wants, and the Lego company will never get any relief for it.
That’s because there’s no use in commerce here. Nobody is selling goods or services using “Legos” or “legos” as a source indicator (i.e., brand name). They can send out letters and publish websites complaining about “trademark misuse,” but you know what? Trademark misuse isn’t a thing in the law. So tough shit. Ultimately, if the public decides that “legos” is more useful as a generic term rather than as a brand name, then the Lego company is screwed.
[quote=“Acsenray, post:51, topic:834627, full:true”]
Growing up I played with Lego a lot. I always called it “Lego” whether it was one piece or 100. When I first heard “Legos” some 20 years ago or so It bugged me. Still does.
Exactly.
Or like how in Hebrew, the colloquial word for oats is “quacker”. Not “Quaker”, although that is the origin of the term, but rather “quacker”, as if you’re describing a duck.
My dad used to refer to all sneakers as “Keds,” a brand that I don’t think I’ve actually seen in real life. I think it was the common term for his generation in India.
On the “Lego” vs. “Legos” divide: I assume this is partially also a US vs. UK (or non-US) divide, because in the States there is a completely unrelated food product called “Eggos” (frozen waffles), pronounced not as “egg-ohs” but “AY-goes” to rhyme with Lego(s). As seen on Stranger Things!
(Actually that’s another question - do you say “LAY-go” or “LEH-go?” Hahaha.)
And key to my point, their TV ads in my youth had the tagline, “Leggo my Eggo!” as someone protested an attempted swiping of their coveted breakfast.
So unconsciously, since
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“Leggo my Eggo” has a homophone for “Lego” for the toy bricks, and
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The food product is actually named in the plural as “Eggos” on the box, even if a single waffle taken from the box (of multiple) is called an “Eggo”
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You see/hear this ad ALL THE TIME in formative years
then in reverse, where a single toy brick might be thought of as “a Lego”, because it is a singular piece taken from a box, one might well think of that as “a box of Legos”.
My guess is, since the toy bricks are actually pronounced with a short E, “LEH-go”, in their commercials (and in the original Danish phrase from which the name derives, I assume), anyone who says “Legos” is pronouncing it “LAY-goes” in subsconscious patterning after “Eggos”.
I know because I do this, or did this, and never realized it nor stopped to think about why until just now.
**NOTE: um, I see in that video clip I linked to that the box just says “Eggo”. Well shoot. But I’m sure everyone I know calls them “Eggos”.
Well, there are a LOT of things I never heard of until I got on the web. LOL
In any case, “Lego” is a brand name for a set of construction blocks. To me, if you say, “There are 3 Legos on the floor.”, you are telling me that there are three separate sets on the floor. A simple solution is to simply say, “There are three Lego blocks on the floor.” Problem solved.
Legos are bricks, not blocks.
WHAT? You seriously pronounce “Eggo” as “Ay-go”? How do you pronounce “egg”? Ayg?
Also, I have never heard the “Lay-go” pronunciation for Lego. It’s Leg-o.
Yes, the TV ad I linked to clearly pronounces it (to my ears) as “AY-go” waffles. Not “EGG-oh”. To the degree that the pronunciation of the tagline is forced to say “LAY-go my AY-go” where saying “LAY-go” for “leggo” is exaggerated purely for the rhyme effect.
And saying “LAY-go” for the toy bricks is pretty common, too, I think. I guess because that’s how “LEGO” would naturally be pronounced in Spanish?
I wouldn’t say either is definitively right or wrong; in fact I never thought about it until reading this thread. It’d be like asking if “sure” was pronounced “sherr” or “shore”. I hear and say it both ways, though one predominates (“shore” as in “Yeah, sure, whatever” but “sherr” in “Surely you jest” - maybe because of that Airplane! gag about “don’t call me Shirley” that wouldn’t work otherwise).
Imagining stepping on a loose brick and complaining, “WHO LEFT ALL THIS LEGO SCATTERED ALL OVER THE FLOOR?” I’d probably be saying “LAY-go”.
BTW, if calling the bricks “lay-go” blows your mind, if you Google for “lego pronounced as laygo” you’ll find that there is a third “accepted” way to pronounce it:
… wait for it …
“LEE-go”. (What?)
But I guess I cannot judge.
WHAT are you taking about? “Eggos” is pronounced like “egg-ohs.” It sounds exactly like Legos. The commercial you linked to has everyone saying “egg-ohs.” On Stranger Things they say “egg-ohs.” Maybe if you have a super exaggerated Southern accent you might say “AY-goes.”
I have also never ever heard anyone call the bricks “Lay-goes.”