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Yeah, for some reason, we tend to associate popular brands of product as the generic names for the product.
I think that it's more of a matter of the way marketing and distribution was done at the time than popularity. Popular radio and television jingles had (and still have) a profound impact on the American consumer. Being inundated with advertising and marketing and having your local grocery store stock a "National" brand as well as a "store brand" or "generic" is mostly responsible in the US. So if the Jell-O brand gelatin is $1.99, the store brand is also sold (often the same exact thing and often produced in the same factory), in a different package might sell for $1.29. Brand loyalty is strange in the US, but it is a fact of life. So we tend to refer to all gelatin as Jell-o to identify it in conversation.

Certainly it takes less time to say than fruit flavoured gelatin dessert. We do the same in Britain with vaccuum cleaners and Hoover, incidentally. I'm sure there are others, but I can't recall them at the moment.

dsteingass wrote:Yeah, for some reason, we tend to associate popular brands of product as the generic names for the product.
I think that it's more of a matter of the way marketing and distribution was done at the time than popularity. Popular radio and television jingles had (and still have) a profound impact on the American consumer. Being inundated with advertising and marketing and having your local grocery store stock a "National" brand as well as a "store brand" or "generic" is mostly responsible in the US. So if the Jell-O brand gelatin is $1.99, the store brand is also sold (often the same exact thing and often produced in the same factory), in a different package might sell for $1.29. Brand loyalty is strange in the US, but it is a fact of life. So we tend to refer to all gelatin as Jell-o to identify it in conversation.

Same thing with Crayons. There is alot of knock off brands, but they are all Crayons in my book, same with play-doh

But... they are crayons. It's not a brand name.

Well holy gak....your right. I just googled it

Ok well my play-doh example still stands

That it does! And I'm the same, it'll always be play-doh to me. Even the stuff my mum used to cook up at home was play-doh.

Interestingly, brands hate this kind of thing. The loss of the uniqueness of the brand impacts on their sales, they say. It takes away the distinctiveness of their product over any other product.

Pah shaw! I say, stop pricing your gak that much over the generic brand. LEGO Im looking at you!

Megabloks is made of bits of dead Chinese orphans, I'm pretty sure. I'll take the overpriced LEGO any day. But then, I still buy things from GW. Clearly I've got issues with sensible use of my money.

A grown man purchasing Lego stuff at all could be consider such an issue. It's, uh, for my nephew. Yeah...

I wont lie, Ive used that excuse before.

*cashier rings up random toy*
*me speaking to myself*
Yea.... my son will LOVE that.......................................................................

I am a grown man that regularly purchases Lego, we are called AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego) complete with conventions, shows, and clubs, and an active secon-hand market for parts (www.bricklink.com). And there are hundreds of thousands of us (www.mocpages.com) of us. Mega Blocks are NOT the same quality as Lego, they seem cheap-ish.

You got a sig-fig, dsteingass?

no, I' really just a lurker there

Ah, pity.

Avatar 720 wrote:Because we're better than you yanks

True words LOL

But we have dental insurance!

htj wrote:Megabloks is made of bits of dead Chinese orphans, I'm pretty sure. I'll take the overpriced LEGO any day. But then, I still buy things from GW. Clearly I've got issues with sensible use of my money.

A grown man purchasing Lego stuff at all could be consider such an issue. It's, uh, for my nephew. Yeah...

There's nothing wrong with buying Lego It's just not very good anymore - good as in terrible models of choice with lack of imagination thrown into the models. It's all about playsets now...

KingCracker wrote:I wont lie, Ive used that excuse before.

*cashier rings up random toy*
*me speaking to myself*
Yea.... my son will LOVE that.......................................................................

See, friend of mine at my club brought in this big rubber toy thing, a mummies head, but with a clear plastic ball inside filled with goo and stuff so when you squeeze it it comes out.

He made no pretense, it was for him, his kids can play with books. He even told me about a time he bought a massive lego set for his son, and 10 minutes into it had evicted his son and taken over the set.

Juvieus Kaine wrote:

htj wrote:Megabloks is made of bits of dead Chinese orphans, I'm pretty sure. I'll take the overpriced LEGO any day. But then, I still buy things from GW. Clearly I've got issues with sensible use of my money.

A grown man purchasing Lego stuff at all could be consider such an issue. It's, uh, for my nephew. Yeah...

There's nothing wrong with buying Lego It's just not very good anymore - good as in terrible models of choice with lack of imagination thrown into the models. It's all about playsets now...

Personally, I like the new city stuff. A real return to form. Very keen on the Indiana Jones knock off stuff too. I don't hark back to the days of it being just a box of coloured blocks, as that was naff.

And the modular city sets are the shiznit too, I have the Fire Brigade and Grand Emporium.....best sets ever!

Why did you get rid of the Alien sets, LEGO? WHY!?

Lego never really gets rid of a line though, they always come out with more sets after several years of nothing...the pegleg pirates and all!

..or so it seems they are brilliant marketers, re-release the stuff we had as children in the 1980s now when our generation has children...win win

The new aliens aren't half as good as the old ones... I miss the old ones...

As an American we all have preconceived notions of other nations. Even those than speak the same language.

I was struck on my last visit to the British Isles by how many freakin' accents you can cram into a relatively small landmass. The US by contrast has many accents and pronounciations as well, but scattered over a far larger area.

It wasn't complete culture shock as I had been 'seconded' to a British unit for a while. One particular Corporal comes to mind, I couldn't understand a thing he said... but then, many of his own unit couldn't either.

I though all Aussies were supposed to sound like Crocodile Dundee. Most don't and there doesn't seem to be much of an accent at all really to those I spoke to. Usually comes out when they're in their cups.

The Kiwis sound a lot like their southern hemisphere brethren. To my ear the accent is so subtle as to be non-existant. But don't tell them that. You'd think the Aussies I spoke to couldn't understand a word a Kiwi said, but that might be another matter entirely.

The Canadians. The closest accent to our own, but even they have their own odd set of accents like 'Newfie'; completely grating to my ear. Then, you go out west and talk to folks in Vancouver, BC and you'd think you were in Northern California (and yes, they sound different than those in Southern California).

Oddly enough, the people who I spoke to overseas that I understood the easiest (other than the Canadians) were the Dutch of all people. Those troops spoke the best American English I've ever heard... even better than that in my own neighborhood. Which, coincidentally, was settled by the Dutch many, many years ago.

I think that people in the Canadian Military say leftenant but not in the general population, if that makes sense.

Uhlan wrote:The Kiwis sound a lot like their southern hemisphere brethren. To my ear the accent is so subtle as to be non-existant. But don't tell them that.

Aww dude dont do that. Thats a bad move. They hate it when you call em Australians.

Uhlan wrote:I thought all Aussies were supposed to sound like Crocodile Dundee. Most don't

The few American tourists i have met have all thought the the same thing and were blown away/devestated that its not the case.

Brother Azul wrote:

Uhlan wrote:I thought all Aussies were supposed to sound like Crocodile Dundee. Most don't

The few American tourists i have met have all thought the the same thing and were blown away/devestated that its not the case.

I was attached to a small unit of Aussies in Iraq, and when one of our guys was like that.. a couple of them were "generous" enough to put on the Dundee accent; He left the room, they went back to talking like normal.. funny thing really, and a great great group of guys.

dsteingass wrote:curious, why do British pronounce the rank of "lieutenant" as "Left-tenant" and not "Lew-tenant" ?

and why do you pronounce "Aluminum" as "alu-min-ee-um"?

I've been watching a lot of Doctor Who and Top Gear on BBC America lately and wondered, thanks

Aluminium has an I in there, the second one, before the U... so the more appropriate question is 'Why do Americans say Alu-min-um and completely ignore the second I?'

ANSWER ME THAT!

Also, why on earth do you spell sulphur as sulfur when you accept that ph makes an f sound my spelling phosphate correctly rather than as fosfate? Fosfurus?

And please, allow a Russian bride to explain the Lieutenant issue:



God, watching that I can feel my IQ decrease in real-time...

Because it isnt spelled here with an extra "I". Just like the unnecessary extra "U" in colour, armour, flavour, and the like. Americans can apparently ignore whatever we like and business continues as usual in the world I guess.
Sulfur is an incorrect spelling, who uses it that way?

In science over here, we were taught that Yanks spell it as sulfur... Wikipedia seems to suggest that either is correct.

That's ok, they taught us in school that in the event of Nuclear war that if we "duck and cover" under our wooden school desk that we would be safe. There was a lot of veiled government propaganda in the US public school system too.