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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

Any time you see a demand to use special characters or formatting in 'how you should refer to our stuff', feel free to completely ignore it, since at that point it's just marketing fluff.

I remember one company whose marketing department demanded that every mention of our product be in the assigned font, bolded, with part of the name subscripted and ®'d. Even in support emails. Even in followups. They never saw just how amazingly artificial it was and how it actually created (mild) barriers to rapport with users. Needless to say, everyone in sales and support that had a clue decided to put that directive into the round file.

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I agree. However - 'Legos' is just stupid. Who decided a single brick was a 'lego' and therefore the plural was 'legos'? It sounds bizarre to me as a Brit :)

PS It's maths, not math.

I was thinking about this, and I'm not sure what the rule is.

On the one hand you have 'Meccano', 'Playmobile' and similar, when referring to collections of brand items.

But on the other hand, you would refer to a single brand car park as 'Toyotas' or a collection of single brand laptops as 'Lenovos' without anyone batting an eye.

I'm with you - 'legos' sounds stupid to me - but really I need someone more formally trained in grammar for this one :)

It comes down to whether the stuff is perceived as lots of little indistinguishable bits, or a few big chunks. The former category (mass or non-count nouns) includes water, grain (in the sense of a quantity of grain, not lots of kinds of grains), sand, snow, etc. They are not inflected for the plural and do not take numbers - we say "three grains of sand" not "three sands". It's plausible for Lego to work the same way - so "ten pieces of lego", not "ten legos".

Perhaps in these oft-cited days of lego sets that are more like a few big pieces than lots of little pieces, people will start to think differently.

"three sands" sounds like something Clarkson would say ... I think, his image immediately flashed in my mind when reading that.

Exactly. In English "Lego" is a mass noun, like water and sand. We say "a piece of lego" or "a lego piece" to identify a single brick.

I guess in American they don't treat it as a mass noun, and maybe they say "a lego" instead of "a piece of lego".

Genericization happens all the time. Many brands throughout modern history have fallen into similar patterns[0] (capitalization sometimes, but not always, survives). Where I grew up in Mississippi, many people would refer to soft drinks as "[Cc]oke" which led to interesting excerpts such as "What kind of coke do you want? We have Coke, Sprite, Dr. Pepper...".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericization

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