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Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

One issue: Lego is the plural of Lego.

Legos make tomato paste.

Sidenote: If you're trying to coin a catchy phrase - make sure it's correct and doesn't play into a grammatical flame war.

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I just can't bring myself to care. I'm a life-long lego fan, been playing with them since I was old enough to play with Duplo. As an adult, I've got shelves covered in lego sets, a lego brick tattooed on my wrist, and saw Lego Movie on release day. And I don't give a single shit what people call the bricks so long as it's not megablok, one of the other knockoff brands, or for some reason K'Nex.

I'm not lego's marketing department, I'm not their lawyer, I'm not their CEO. It's not up to me to give a crap about the pedantic nonsense that is their preference for how you refer to their product. It's not brand confusion. Lego, Legos, LEGO, LEGOS, whatever. People know what you're talking about, and they aren't getting the name "lego" mixed up with anything. People that see the Megabloks and other knock offs and think that they're legos are what they need to worry about. But an informed child, consumer, etc. knows better already. It didn't take very many Megablok sets before I realize they were incredibly inferior in quality and the colors were way off. Lego is obviously the superior product even to a child.

Okay so I lied. I do care, a lot. More than I should. But I'm just so sick of pedantic idiots hopping into conversations like some sort of know it all "WELL ACTUALLY....". Fuck off. Lego, legos, LEGOS, LEGO, doesn't matter we all know what's being talked about. And derailing discussions over that nonsense is obnoxious.

English people should give up on making new and weird rules for pluralising words in their language. We (a certain slavic country) just use consistent rules on almost all words, and never have a problem. Why the hell does it matter how the danish pluralise "lego"?

A discussion is what it is and in this case a meta discussion on the language used in an article is no less appropriate given the response.

I couldn't bring myself to read it and wasn't alone and it annoyed me enough to say something. Should she have known better or care - maybe not. Her audience is probably just Silicon Valley and extend to the rest of the US.

But this is the Internet, so welcome to the wider world.

Honestly if you can't bring yourself to read an article because of a brand used incorrectly, you need to get a grip. Fast.

In colloquial North American English "Legos" is pretty common. The effort to get people to not use the form "Legos" seems to originate from branding. The Lego company does not want "Lego" to refer to all brick toys, much the way that Kleenex does not want "kleenex" to mean any paper tissue. Anyway, pushing for "proper usage" is an uphill battle ;)

"The Lego company does not want "Lego" to refer to all brick toys, much the way that Kleenex does not want "kleenex" to mean any paper tissue."

I do not believe this at all. Being the default word for its category is the truest sign of the penetration of a brand.

Even so, a company will want to avoid losing the trademark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark#Avoiding_gen... (Lego is one of the examples as a success story for this approach)

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/google-doesnt-want-people-u...

Companies seem to think different about this.

Lego the company was fiercely protective of their IP. They had a patent they regularly enforced. Once the patent expired they took MegaBlocks to court trying to claim the shape of their bricks was trademarked (they lost this... but took it all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court).

It's also a sign that you're becoming a commodity which is bad for business. You can Xerox your document on a Canon, but you can't Google something on Bing.

Here is a specific example of them requesting customers to help protect the brand by not calling them "legos".

http://english.stackexchange.com/a/47223

To British ears, it just sounds wrong. It sets off our grammar sensors, not our trademark infringement sensors. It's absolutely not a complaint about genericisation of the Lego brand.

"I need more legos to finish off this house" sounds, to a Brit, like someone saying "I need more sands to finish off this sandcastle," or "I need more ices to finish this ice sculpture". Lego is kind of like a substance in our language. Pluralizing it is just wrong.

Or "I'm going to take a maths course"? :-)

We just worry that out of all of mathematics, Americans seem to only want to study one singular math.

When a publication like The Atlantic Monthly, one of the most venerable and critically acclaimed bastions of the English language, literature, and culture, refers to them as "Legos" (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/02/-em...), it means you can finally crawl down off your absurd high horse and give it a rest. Thank you for your service, sir. Here's your lapel pin. There's a doctor down the hall if you need to talk about your feelings.

I stopped reading it, it was jarring to see multiple times.

I'm really curious; where are you from? Use of the "Legos" plural form here in the United States seems to be by far the majority. What areas in the world get it right?

In the UK we call them lego because we consider it to be a mass noun, like sand rather than sands, and a grain of sand and a piece of lego.

I've heard "Legos" said plenty of times in England. So while it might not be correct it's hardly uncommon.

Weird. Lived here all my life, only time I've ever heard it is in "look at those wacky Yanks" conversations. South coast/London here. Maybe it's regional?

Trying to pattern match on my experiences, I might conclude that it's an age thing. People over 40 are more likely to say "Legos" than those under 30.

From a UK perspective. I'm 48, most of my friends are 38-60'ish, we all call it Lego. I'm more inclined to believe that it's younger people in the UK (under 25-30) that use "Legos", simply due to the availability of US kids telly that us older farts never had (I barely had three channels up until 2002 - BBC1/2 and Channel4). My ex's kids picked up some of these aberrations ("so fun" instead of "so much fun" is an example that used to grate for me). There were so many times I wanted to sabotage that bloody Sky box.

Like math? ;)

So I guess US usage would be "Look at all my Legos". How does that work in singular? "Give me that red Lego"?

In the UK I've only heard Lego referred to like: "Give me that red brick", "Give me that red Lego brick", "Look at all my Lego", "Look at all my Lego bricks"

In the US usage, "legos" refers to many blocks. "Lego" is generally used as an adjective, referring to things constructed from many legos. "Lego house" or "Lego car", for example. It has been a while since I played with them, but to refer to a single brick, I would usually mention the size. "The red 2x4", for example, to refer to a red lego brick that has 8 pips.

Interesting point about the adjective, it's the same here. So the only difference seems to be when referring to a pile of bricks.

I struggled. It's interesting to me just how annoying I find that word. (Native Brit).

There is the possibility that it's been drilled into our brains from a very young age.

http://www.retroist.com/2009/01/14/1985-lego-catalog/lego-23...

Not even Xerox can Xerox. [1] [2]

Not even Lego has Legos. [3]

[1] https://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/collection/data/880574...

Just a little reminder from Xerox / prepared by Needham, Harper & Steers Advertising, Inc. -- Not even Xerox can Xerox / prepared by Needham Harper Worldwide, Inc. (March 1985) -- Once a trademark, not always a trademark / [Xerox Corporation].

[2] https://trademarkmusings.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/not-even-x...

Though it was a long time ago, I recall that my law school Business Torts casebook contained a copy of Xerox’s old ad, “Not Even Xerox Can Xerox”, which Xerox used to promote proper use of its trademark and fight genericide. Back in the day, Xerox was by far the most well-know copier brand, leased by offices all over. In this day and age, now that most people have a copier at home (as part of a multifunction printer) and it could be a Canon, HP, Brother, Epson or other brand, I think the younger folk are not so likely to refer to copying as “Xeroxing”. It poses an interesting quandary: Xerox may be winning the genericide war but they are no longer dominating the competition. Which is preferable?

[3] http://www.lego.com/en-us/legal/legal-notice/fair-play

Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site

If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS". Never say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs". Also, the trademark should appear in the same typeface as the surrounding text and should not be isolated or set apart from the surrounding text. In other words, the trademarks should not be emphasized or highlighted. Finally, the LEGO trademark should always appear with a ® symbol each time it is used.

Then "lego" isn't the LEGO® trademark, therefore legos is perfectly acceptable.

If you want to fix a real grammatical problem that's getting worse, how about going after the "anyways" crowd.

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/anyway-or...

It's now being used as the filler word in podcasts.

That's a ways off of being fixed.

Hopefully, people will take to the correct usage.

Is that true for other branded items (such as Oreo cookies) or is it uniquely Lego bricks which incite this type of pedantry?

It depends. In the US, trademarks are intended to protect the consumer, not the company. If consumers no longer associate a name with a particular brand, then the company loses control over the trademark. So long as a company continues to defend the trademark, they maintain control of it. That is why, for example, Xerox had a massive advertising campaign for the use of the word "photocopy". Previously, "Xerox" was used to refer to making a copy of a document, and Xerox (the company) was in danger of losing the trademark.

Wikipedia has a good list of names that are in the process of becoming generic, much to the dismay of the companies that hold the trademarks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

While you are technically correct (at least in the USA) there are many examples in that least that are widely used as generics for decades while style maintaining trademark protection: 'Kleenex', 'Bubble Warp', 'Dictaphone'...

> In the US, trademarks are intended to protect the consumer, not the company.

They are meant to protect each in different ways.

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