Likewise, seems every mom in America called every video game system a “Nintendo” from 1986 until maybe the Playstation 2.
For a while a “Walkman” was any portable cassette player, since Sony was the first and most popular. They eventually became just cassette players.
As a generic term it was well enough known for Bob Geldof to borrow it with (I assume) everyone getting the joke. Maybe I’m older than you? (60)
That said, upthread mention of Elastoplast reminds me that that was also used as the generic name for a while, before “Plaster” took over.
j
Other than this thread, I’ve only ever seen it used in Jean Kerr’s ‘Please Don’t Eat the Daisies’:
“I say, ‘Christopher, you take a bath and put all your things in the wash,’ and he says, ‘Okay, but it will break the Bendix’ Now at this point the shrewd rejoinder would be, ‘That’s all right, let it break the Bendix.’ But years of experience have washed over me in vain and I, perennial patsy, inquire, ‘Why will it break the Bendix?’ So he explains, ‘Well, if I put all my things in the wash, I’ll have to put my shoes in and they will certainly break the machinery,’”
I’ve never heard anyone in real life use bendix.
I experienced an amusing inversion of this when I was in Cairo. We were staying in an apartment that had no refrigerator when we arrived, and our host promised to get us a “Frigidaire” as soon as possible. A day or two later, he made good on his promise with a Frigidaire freezer. Which was, you should imagine, not so great for keeping leftovers and drinking water in. We developed a pattern of putting a bottle of drinking water in at night, taking it out first thing the next morning, and then taking it and a room temp bottle with us when we went out sightseeing.
While reading this thread I noticed that most of these examples are simply because the brand name isn’t around anymore, or there’s enough competition in the space to merit going back to the original term. I haven’t heard anyone call a vacuum cleaner a Hoover in ages, but that’s probably because no one I know owns a Hoover. We’re a Dyson and Shark society now! Xerox? I mean, I guess I don’t pay attention to the copy machines at work, but do they still even make copiers? I know Frigidaire still makes refrigerators, but most fridges I know are now Samsung or LG techno-wonders.
I wonder how long it’ll take before people start saying “cola” instead of “Coke.” I believe in the UK and possibly elsewhere, but not in the US, the term “lemonade” is generic for clear lemon-lime sodas. Do people in the American South still say “Coke” to refer to sodas generally (including e.g. Sprite) or is that dying out?
It seems like there was a time when every four-wheel-drive vehicle was a “Jeep”. I know when I was a kid I used to call the Toyota FJ40 Land Cruiser a “Toyota Jeep”. Now they’re all just called SUVs and Jeep is a specific make of SUV.
Yes, but I thought the OP mentioned Kleenex, Hoover etc as *counter-*examples, i.e. things for which we still use the trademarked names.
Ah - quite correct. I was going to put my hand up and confess on that one; but then kambuckta pointed out that the verb, to hoover, is still current. So I kept quiet.
j
Yes, “coke” is the genericized term for pop or soda in a good part of the south. When someone asks if you want a coke, the correct response is “yes, what kinds do you have?”
Back in the 40s and 50s in the US. Here’s an example. Jean Kerr wrote an essay where she mentions using the bendix (as a generic term).
Pretty sure “oleo” is just short for “oleomargarine”. I didn’t realize “Oleo” was a brand name?
Similarly, and maybe it was just among my group of friends, but there were several years there where we used “Mario” as a generic word for “video game”. “Want to play Mario?” “Sure, what game?” “Er, how about Excitebike?”
Like DorkVader I always believed the term Bendix to refer to an automobile starter motor component. Unlike DorkVader it did not refer to the starter gear (that was simply a "“gear”), but the assembly which forced the starter gear away from the electric motor (towards the flywheel) when the starter motor was turning faster than the starter gear (as when starting the engine) and away from the flywheel (towards the starter motor) when the starter gear was turning faster than the starter motor (as when the engine caught). This disengaged the gear from the flywheel once the engine had started and the device that allowed that to happen was (or, still is, AFAIK) “the bendix”.
I had heard the term used in the sense of a washing machine, but I have always assumed that a similar device was used in older washing machines to drive the agitator and they were designed and produced by the same company (The Bendix Corporation). This thread had me look up the Wikipedia article on Bendix and found I was wrong. While they did produce automotive parts (including starter motors), they never did make washing machines, only sold their name to a company that did. It seems they made quite a bit of stuff.
My dad’s parents called it a Frigidare until the day they died. Granted, they usually actually had that brand, but they’d say it at other people’s homes with other brands. Most people just (and still) call it a fridge (i always have assumed as short for refrigerator).
From like 79-83 they were an “Atari”, they weren’t really a “Nintendo” until 87 or 88 (even though they were out before that that’s more when the name hit “critical mom mass”).
In my part of the American South (South Carolina) that has never been the case in my lifetime.
(Edited for the obligatory XKCD.)
Cellophane
As a kid we always called it “Saranwrap”. Now it’s just plastic wrap. And boy, does the word “wrap” ever look strange if you look at it enough.
StG
And it’s not just that “band-aid” is still the preferred term in the US. I suspect that only about one in ten people here would have any idea what you meant if you said “plaster” or “sticking plaster,” maybe less if you asked without providing context.
“Plaster” here as a noun means only the white building material, although oddly we still use “plaster” as a verb for “to paste something on a vertical surface.”
That’s still what I call it. Being overseas, I didn’t get the memo.
I had a perfect example in Japanese, but I forgot it. Dammit. If I remember, I’ll post it.
A not so perfect example, but similar was that Japanese often called all foreigners “Americans” in the early 80s and the language foreigners spoke “English” but as the awareness that there are other countries in the world led more people to use “foreigners” and “foreign language.”