Choosing our words carefully
Keep language fresh and relevant, not tired and clichéd
You can hear by clicking above, what’s here by flicking below—boom, boom!
Evil
Nazi
Threat
Genocide
Existential
Lie
Terrorism
E N T G E L T = reward in German. Because ... what follows is your reward! (Corny as a Basil Brush joke: Boom, boom!)
Last night was dark: I looked into it and out of it came diminutive humans with pumpkins on their heads, but I warded them off bravely, with sugar candies. It was All Hallows’ Evening, on which evil spirits, of Nazis old and new, did threaten the populace with manic genocide, perpetuating their existential threats with lies and terrorism.
And a bright morn has dawned on the morrow to expunge all bastardisations of spiritual existence along with clichéd, sensationalist usage of tired and unimaginative vocabulary.
One of the major ideas behind registered trademarks is that they should bring the thoughts of those who use and see them immediately to the product or service in question, and it is for this reason that there has been, over time, a general resistance by trademark owners to the use of their trademarks for generic purposes. The Marks must retain their distinctive quality in the eyes of the Spenders.
Hoovering can properly only be done with a Hoover® hoover. All others should be vacuuming with a vacuum cleaner (perchance dyson®ing with a vortex-principle sucking machine).
Google® seems not to object to googling, since their very name is taken from a word that means a godzillion godzillions, and boy, we know how true that is.
Whilst the French all stick tiges in unspeakable places, the English-unspeaking world resorts to the ubiquitous Q-Tip®.
And you’ll no doubt have your own favourite examples of generified trademarks, which you can enter into the comments below and earn a prize of a pat on the back.
The link to All Hallows is a post I saw yesterday on LinkedIn (boom, boom!) from one of you in which a strategy was mapped out in terms of first letters all taken from the word S K E L E T O N. S o I t h o u g h t I w o u l d f o l l o w s u i t.
The “instant recognition” function of a trademark is, however, designed to bring the trademark into constant, everyday thought, so as to reinforce the brand’s presence in the consciousness. I knock things over sometimes and still, to this day, mouth to myself “Oops ... Scotties®” because that was an advert for the paper tissues that was used back in the 1980s. “’Course you can, Malcolm,” was the reassurance given by mum to the young scarf-bedecked son as he was leaving to take an exam, and gets a squeezebox of—we would learn—highly addictive Vick’s® nasal spray squeezed into his hand—now, there’s the rub (boom ... forget it). And, of course, no bar of chocolate is consumed without echoes of Frank Muir’s “Everyone’s a Fruit and Nut-case”, to the strains of Tchaikovsky.
Advertising and trademarks, therefore, rely on the name being pummelled so effectively into the mind that one can’t but help recall the brand any time the phrase or the colour or the shape is perceived by the senses. One becomes so inured to the connection that a red can of soda pop is automatically Coca-Cola®, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing.
Quite the opposite happens with ordinary, non-associated words. Rather than conjuring up instant commercial associations, they just get tired, hackneyed and clichéd.
And so it is with ENTGELT.
Evil: it’s any act by which you do not love others as you would love yourself. No, it is not purposely killing or maiming people for the sheer Hell of it. It is: not loving as you would be loved. We are all (apart from the Dalai Lama as is and Saint Teresa of Calcutta as was, and a few others) evil. Because we do not love as we would be loved. If your total assets are 500,000, give 250,000 to the poor. Now. Not in your will, but now. The Kingdom of Heaven is yours if you do it now. Otherwise, it’s the eye of a needle for you. That’s how hard God can be back to those who think they’re saints.
Nazi: comes from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. In fact, it comes from the first four letters of that name. It’s German and it was a German political party and it became a source of German shame. But Nazi is nowadays a synonym for anyone you don’t like. Because people these days all want to force their views on everyone else. So, we’re all Nazis, in a way. The term has lost its meaning through overuse. In America, there was a term Tobacco Nazi. It fell out of use, because it was taken to mean people who smoke regardless of prohibitions; in fact it was intended to designate those who enforce tobacco prohibitions against smokers. Little Hitlers, one might say.
Threat: The drop in demand for human translation is a threat. To me it is, but maybe not to you. The AI monoliths that produce machine translation programs are the true threat. To me, if not to you. My poverty as a result of AI may send me onto the streets to protest. You may see that as a threat to you, even though I don’t threaten you. But then AI may turn its attention on your sector and procure your own redundancy. Does the threat I pose now become your ally? We perceive and use the word threat without always tracing back exactly what it is that constitutes the perceived threat.
Genocide: eradication of an ethnic community, race or substantial parts thereof. Rwanda. Armenia. The American First Nations. Acadia. Srebrenica. German South-West Africa. The Mau-Mau. Wanting to kill someone because of his race is racial hatred. But genocide is something born of racial hatred and is often combined with political expediency, but not all racial hatred is genocide. If you reserve use of the word to where it’s apropos, you will shock with it all the more.
Existential: The temperature on the surface of Venus is around 900° F. We could never exist on Venus, not as we currently are, and there is no known life on that planet. It’s simply too hot. Or is it? Well, maybe there is some life form there, who knows?
The temperature on Earth’s surface is still way below 900° F and there is a temperature that, when reached here, will render life here as impossible, or possible, as it is on Venus. That there is currently a tendency towards that threshold is not widely contested; what so-called deniers (not the ratings used for classifying ladies’ stockings) would have us believe is that the cause for this tendency is not what a good portion of the scientific community contends that it is. The question turns on the point at which we will cease to exist. That’s an existential question. But existentialism is Nietzsche: the harder you look into the dark, the more the dark starts to look back at you.
Lie: is mendacity—the intention to mislead through knowingly stated untruth. Or half-truth. Or not quite the truth. But not white lies. We define lies as it suits us. Since we cannot always know the state of mind of someone who asserts something, a perceived lie can be based on a lack of knowledge, rather than intention, and calling that a lie can itself constitute a lie: because, if we accuse someone else of lying who states a supposed fact through misapprehension, and we assume in our own minds that they know the true state of affairs, then our own misapprehension of the liar makes us liars. They who profess definitive knowledge will often be found out to have lied.
Terrorism: here’s one you will never have heard before: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter. And that’s worth dwelling on. Because a lot of people get called terrorists who aren’t, in the classic sense, fighting for freedom. They’re fighting for dominance. How can they be Nazis and freedom-fighters at one and the same time? People who dominate through terror are not terrorists, because that convolutes the meaning of the word terrorist. A terrorist engages in acts of terror in order to change policy, but not to dominate as such, though that may be an adjunct.
The English language is replete in words that express shades of meaning. We have the Norman Conquest and the Greek philosophers and the Roman Empire and the British Empire and the linguistic ingenuity of the North American peoples to thank for that. There is really no excuse to allow any word to become a panoply, unless those who so use the language themselves have nefarious—populist—objectives in their sights.
I told a Ukrainian once that, if and when they have recaptured the Donbas regions, they must hold referenda. “Never!” said he. I told him, they must accord the Donbas the very self-determination that they claim for themselves. Otherwise, the next time, I won’t believe them. It’s my view, if it’s not yours.
The same goes for these blanket expressions. Use them with discretion; otherwise, I won’t believe you.
Now, comments below for your favourite generically used trademarks. The best all get virtual pats on backs and a Basil Brush boom, boom!
I was with you until you said the Donbas needs to hold a referendum. If Texas started terrorizing (freedom fighting) with the idea of Texas leaving the Union should we hold a referendum?