Following last week’s talk of trade names, I had an email from Professor Tilli Tansey who, among many distinctions, is an emeritus professor of medical history and pharmacology and past president of the History of Medicine Society. She points out that one of the best examples of a trade name that has become absorbed into routine usage is “tabloid”. These days it just means a newspaper, but that is not where it started life.
“The word was registered,” Tansey writes, “by Henry (later Sir Henry) Wellcome, who coined it in 1884 as a trade name for products of the pharmaceutical company of which he was then joint proprietor, Burroughs Wellcome & Co. These were compressed goods, mainly formulated tablets of defined dosages, but the word also applied to general goods such as tea cubes and bandages. Not surprisingly ‘tabloid’ was frequently misappropriated to describe compact items, although the company vigorously maintained its legal rights and sued offenders worldwide.”
The Times archive has many early references to tabloids, from adverts for “Saccharin — now sold in granular and tabloid form”, to doses of antimalarial quinine used by African explorers. These may not all have been Wellcome products, but there are also law reports on the cases Wellcome brought against companies who attempted to adopt the word for their own purposes.
One of these, from 1903, went to the High Court on appeal, the case hingeing on whether “tabloid” was already descriptive of a general class of objects when Wellcome coined it.
“A plain man,” said the judgment, “may be puzzled to guess how a word which nobody had heard before could be descriptive of anything to the general mind until experience connected it with some actual thing. Of course every word, however meaningless or absurd when invented, becomes descriptive after it is habitually connected in experience with some concrete idea. But if that derived descriptiveness be fatal to a trademark, then all trademarks become invalid as soon as they become useful.” Case dismissed.
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In her email, Tansey added that “After Sir Henry’s death in 1936 (when his will established what is now the medical research charity the Wellcome Trust) the company’s vigilance began to lapse and the word passed into more common usage to indicate compressed goods, most especially newspapers.”
The newspaper connection was slower to catch on in the UK than it had been in the States. A Times report from the 1920s applied it to a particularly lurid New York paper that had published photographs taken with a smuggled camera in the execution chamber where a woman was being electrocuted for murdering her husband.
Stories like this helped to establish “tabloid” as a qualitative rather than dimensional description. No surprise that The Times, when it ceased to be a broadsheet in 2004, was careful to describe its new format as “compact”.
We’re over this
On Monday we remarked that the footballer “Cole Palmer’s impact on Chelsea’s upwards trajectory cannot be understated.” “Er, yes it can,” writes Maurice Barnes from Ipswich. “You meant exactly the opposite — that it cannot be overstated.”
This “infuriating solecism”, as he not unreasonably describes it, is not confined to football reports. We recently gave Geoff Hayhurst of Gorran, Cornwall, an early night. “I was wondering,” he wrote, “if there might be anything to watch on TV and I noticed a programme about the Chilean dictator General Pinochet which sounded quite interesting. Then I read your previewer’s comment that ‘you can’t underestimate the world historical significance of what Pinochet actually did’, so I decided to read a book instead.”
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The style guide has words to say about this. “Underestimate often confused with overestimate: note that the importance of writing ‘its importance cannot be overestimated’ cannot be overestimated.”
All change please
Nick Gellatly says that any card payment resisters who fear for the future of small-value coins need worry no more. “The penny is alive, well and living in Tesco.”
“I sympathise with the 1950s bus conductor you mentioned last week, who bridled at being offered eight farthings for a modest fare. In recent times, that passenger has been managing the self-service tills at my local supermarket. In return for the customer who audaciously pays in cash, the checkout gives change in the maximum possible quantity of coins. Yesterday I got seven pennies, five 2ps and a quantity of 5p and 10p coins in change of 97p.”
That must have made his trousers rattle. Tim Richards writes that at his school back in the 1960s “a couple of us would take farthings to chemistry class and dip them into silver nitrate, then pass them off at break as sixpenny pieces to buy biscuits and coffee. You had to use them pretty much instantly, as the silver wore off with any rubbing.”
I’m shocked. Shocked. Why did I never think of that?
Wills o’ the wisp
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Angela Wyllie of Hereford is getting increasingly furious, she says, at the use of “ascend” in reference to the throne.
“A new monarch ‘accedes to’ the throne; he does not ‘ascend to’ it. You recently treated us to ‘when Prince William ascends to the throne’, a picture too awful to contemplate of the prince somehow wafting about in space. Logically, this usage would change Accession Day into Ascension Day. We already have one of these; Prince William is not, as yet, Jesus Christ.”
Heavens, no, but thank you for reminding us. I’d never heard of Accession Day, but we live and learn.
