I don’t think I ever heard pacifiers being called binkies when I was a kid. Granted, I didn’t hang around babies much. But if I heard the word “binky,” I’d assume it was a baby-talk word for “blanket.”
Now that I’m a new parent, though, it seems like many if not most other parents refer to pacifiers as binkies.
Binky does seem to be a registered trademark for a line of Playtex pacifiers, but, like Xerox and Coke, people I know aren’t picky about which brand they’re calling a binky. They’re all binkies.
When did this usage take off? Does it predate the Playtex brand, or is it a trademark under genericization?
(American parents, that is. I know they’re “soothers” in Britain. I may have to start using that.)
I don’t know where to begin to find a cite but I first heard it when the brand name was refered to (my niece had one). I never heard of it before the brand name. I always assumed it came from that.
I could be wrong, but my California born and raised daughter-in-law implied that that was what they had always called it, so I inferred it was a west coast thing. Since it has been 30 years since I had a child young enough to use one, I don’t know what word they use here in the east anymore, but in our house it was always called a “faffy” based on my oldest child’s pronunciation of pacifier.
Binky first meant blanket. Baby talk explains this one, and it’s easy to see why.
Then binky meant any sort of baby soother attachment thing. Most often a blanket, sometimes a pacifier, sometimes a stuffed duck. When WhyKid was an infant, this is what baby care books called attachment items.
Finally, Playtex named their pacifier Binky, and it became a common (though not exclusive) term for any pacifier.
“Binky pacifier” gets 597 hits on Google, mostly for retail sites selling Binkys. “Binky blanket” gets 192.
FWIW, the nurses at WhyBaby’s hospital here in America called them “Soothers”, because they were all of the brand name Soothers.
Right, and I did that first, but you end up with sites that have “pacifier” but not “binky” and vise-versa. In the end, it seemed more telling to me that the majority of “binky” as relating directly to pacifiers was retail, as opposed to lots of colloquial hits for binky and blanket.
I’ve lived on the West Coast since childhood (1966-present) and I never heard the term “binky” until I heard a teenager use the word in the mid-1990s. They were always called pacifiers when I was growing up. Of course, I’m still trying to figure out when “stocking cap” became “beanie”. I always thought a beanie was a fabric skullcap with or without a propeller on top.
While I suppose that’s technically true, I don’t think the word swept the country back in 1935. Also, I noted the Playtex connection in the OP – I’m still not sure if the term predates Playtex or vice versa.
And I’m not the only person who thinks “binky” has become a lot more popular in the last few years.
I just realized I misread your comment – because while it’s true Binky’s been a registered trademark since 1935, Playtex’s line is newer than that. I don’t know when it was rolled out, but the word’s popularity may have taken off at the same time.
I know we used “binky” in the hospital because playtex supplied them to us free. A lot of the nurses, never having had children of their own, simply called them by what was on the package…Heck, maybe it’s our fault!
Call me another hole in the ‘west coast’ argument. I lived in LA as boy and adolescent through the early 1980s and never heard them called ‘binky’. They were always ‘pacifiers’.
I recall noticing the universality of ‘binky’ in the mid-90s sometime.
