Do you know what the Russian is for ” a diaper”?
Pampers. This was the very first brand to hit the freshly formed post-Soviet market in 1992, and the brand name became generic. (We also refer to a photocopy as a xerox for the same reason, for instance.)
Imagine my disappointment, then, when I discovered that Pampers are actually a pretty sucky brand. They leak, they feel wet, and they are decidedly inferior to Huggies. I feel very betrayed by capitalism.
So what do you call a…
kleenex
dry ice
jacuzzi
escalator
flip phone
PC
kerosene
aspirin
laundromat
heroin
…and all these other once legally protected trademarks? 🙂
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Jacuzzi, escalator, kerosene, aspirin and heroin are the same in Russian.
Was heroin a trademark??
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Sort of heroin is geroin but often it is referred to as mak.
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“Heroin” was trademarked as a “non-addictive cough suppressant” by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer in 1898. It wasn’t sold directly to the public, but dispensed by physicians.
At the time, tuberculosis and pneumonia were among the leading causes of death worldwide, and the most widely used cough suppressant was codeine (which was already known to be addictive).
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Pampers (singular with the plural pampersy) and ksero (indeclined) are also used in Polish. For that matter I think both are used as general words in the US.
Turning a brand name into a generic word is extremely common all over the world.
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And of course we’ve turned Google into a verb meaning “to search the Internet.”
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