Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (54 page)

For instance, brand names have often become generic words, thanks to the popularity of the products they name. Thus the old-time General Motors brand of refrigerator called “Frigidaire” became, in the 1920s, an uncapitalized noun in American English (and also in French), just as the brand name “Hoover” for vacuum cleaners became an ordinary uncapitalized noun in British English. Essentially the same story can be told about the brand names “Kleenex”, “Coke”, “Xerox”, “Saran Wrap”, “Dustbuster”, “Scotch Tape”, “Teflon”, “Q-Tips”, “Jacuzzi”, “Frisbee”, and so on (and thus we could as easily have decapitalized these words as left them with capital initial letters).

In all these cases, first there is a small category whose members are the products of the specific brand name — and then new products are made that are different enough from the original ones that they seem to call for a new word, yet at the same time, they aren’t
fundamentally
different from the original products, since they all share the key
characteristics that created the need for the original products. When people want to give a name to these new copycat products that form a halo around the original ones, they will often spontaneously borrow the original brand name but will decapitalize it in order to indicate that this is an extended sense of the original word (much as “Moon” became “moon”). The new members and the old members of the original category now all belong to this new category. Thus the word “kleenex”, when decapitalized, stands for all tissue papers, but when capitalized, it stands only for tissue papers of the Kleenex brand.

Now this phenomenon might seem like a desirable thing from the point of view of a popular brand, a demonstration that it is collectively recognized as the most canonical item of its sort. However, although a few companies might welcome such genericizing of their names, more often the shareholders of the genericized companies do not see things this way at all. Indeed, major brand names tend to combat this process very actively, since it tends to dilute the meaning of their name, in the sense that people soon come to hear the word that once was a brand name simply as a bland name without any identity at all.

Brands want to be recognized for their uniqueness, not for their genericity. Who would appreciate it if, within a few years of their naming their very popular dog “Oliver”, bandwagon-jumping families in the neighborhood had given every single new dog the name “Oliver”?

The turning of a proper noun into a common noun transforms a once-special term into a commonplace. Who would ever proudly boast of owning “an authentic jacuzzi” or “a genuine frisbee”? In the case of these two brands (and both are indeed brands), the unmarked sense has long since eclipsed the marked sense, and as a result the first letter has been demoted to lowercase status. This type of slide, which entails the loss of legal protection of the brand name, has been dubbed “genericide”. This explains why, when the verb “to google” first appeared in the 2006 editions of the
Oxford English Dictionary
and the
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
, the Silicon Valley giant instantly launched an intense campaign to restrict the usage of its name, particularly focusing on preventing the proper name “Google” (or rather, the non-proper-name “google”) from being used as a verb denoting Web searches regardless of what software is carrying them out.

In the above examples, in which a single word comes to occupy two levels of abstraction, we recognize the telltale signature of the phenomenon of marking. And by coincidence, the noun “mark” is occasionally used in English to mean “label” or “brand name”, as in “What mark is your shirt?” Actually, this unexpectedly close relationship between the ordinary word “mark” and the technical term “marking” is not a coincidence, since a commercial brand or logo or mark is a visual identifier, allowing potential customers to distinguish similar-looking products from each other. And the adjective “marked”, whose origins have to do with the idea of stamping something with a distinguishing symbol (a “mark”), is used to describe subcategories, much as a commercial mark designates a subcategory of products that all belong to one single overarching category.

Commercial marks (
i.e.
, brand names) such as we’ve been discussing make up but the tip of the iceberg of the phenomenon of lexical labels that fluidly swivel back and forth between denoting just one single entity and denoting a far vaster category. There are in fact cases where the name of a unique individual, place, or object can, despite its uniqueness, be naturally applied to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of entities.

The worldwide unity of the Catholic church is due to the existence of a single spiritual leader, the head of the Vatican: the Pope. Aside from a few historical upheavals that led, at the end of the fourteenth century, to the simultaneous naming of two popes — Urban VI and Clement VII — Catholics have always been able to look to their unique Pope for leadership. He is
the
Pope, and that’s all there is to it. However, if the current Pope enjoys the distinction of being the unique terrestrian member of this exalted category (previous members enjoying eternal repose), his title is extremely sought after when it comes to the broader sense of the term, which is to say, the unmarked category.

If one goes to the Web, the papal harvest is rich. Pop Art has its uncontested pope: Andy Warhol. The pope of the personal computer industry is heralded as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. John Waters is pronounced the pope of bad taste, Robert Parker the pope of wine, Paul Bocuse the pope of gastronomy, etc. Indeed, popes with a lowercase “p” proliferate like flies. Picasso has been called the pope of Cubism, André Breton that of surrealism. Bob Marley has been declared to be Reggae’s pope, Ray Charles jazz’s pope, and Frankie Ruiz the pope of salsa music. Celtic music, too, finds its pope in Alan Stivell, and contemporary abstract music, not to be left out, has Pierre Boulez for its pope. While the Dalai Lama is anointed the pope of Buddhism, Richard Dawkins is acclaimed the pope of atheism, and lastly — surely to no one’s surprise — Pierce’s Pitt is proclaimed the pope of pulled pork (where? in Williamsburg, Virginia).

But why quit when you’re on a roll? If you persevere in your Web search, you can find popes of positivism, football, Japanese trash cinema, neoconservatism, boxing, free software, haiku, contemporary design, multimedia, management, documentary, TV news, underground cinema, the harpsichord, Scandinavian rock music, manga, rap, tennis, Italian jeans, dog biscuits, coaching, bio-art, broccoli, business calendars, and on and on. Indeed, the list of popes can be extended pretty much without end, and so it makes sense to declare a state of “papal hyper-inflation”, meaning that there are so many popes of this, that, and the other thing that at this point the title has lost much of its punch. No matter how narrow some human activity might be, there is always some practitioner of it who is perceived by somebody or other as having sufficient prestige and sway as to merit a nomination to the pantheon of “generalized popes”.

And while we’re talking about pantheons, they, too, form an interesting case, hovering blurrily somewhere between proper noun and common noun, somewhere between singular uniqueness — “The Pantheon” — and plural (“many pantheons”). Indeed, even when doubly capitalized, as just shown, the name is not unambiguous,
there being good reasons to think it designates Il Pantheon (in Rome) and other good reasons to think it designates Le Panthéon (in Paris). In any case, pantheons were originally conceived of as monuments erected to honor a civilization’s gods (or perhaps its Gods). The Pantheons in Rome and Paris both represent the highest honor that their respective nations can bestow on individuals of great achievement, serving them as a kind of exalted cemetery. But the category of pantheons is far wider than this, since a pantheon can be a kind of “software temple”, or a “temple of the imagination”, requiring neither a building nor burials — just a listing of names of a number of important individuals. Accordingly, Albert Einstein is clearly in the pantheon of physicists, and Henri Poincaré, though not buried in the Panthéon in Paris, certainly figures very high in the pantheon of mathematicians.

Various sacred sites and books serve to keep religion on people’s minds. Thus the name of Mecca, a destination for millions of pilgrims each year from all around the world, has become, in its decapitalized version, a word that captures the idea of a venerated place — indeed, a cult place — for a particular activity. Below are listed a few dozen meccas that we came across using, shall we say, the pope of search engines. We found meccas of:

What is constant in all these meccas — what constitutes the “essence of
mecca
-ness” — is the idea of a
place of supreme importance
, the idea of
uniqueness
(even though for some of the activities two or three would-be meccas vie for the title of
the
mecca), and even the idea of some kind of
sacredness
(even though, for most of these meccas, the activity in question has nothing to do with religion).

The Book of Books — that is, the Bible for some, and the Coran for others — has also been deemed worthy of becoming an abstract category. The category of “Book of Books”, representing just
one
book, gets stretched so that it becomes applicable to all sorts of different books in different domains (but presumably just one per domain). Thus there exists a bible of Thai cooking, a bible of ribbon embroidery, and a bible of body-building. And the most reliable book about gardening in an Islamic country might well be called “the coran of gardening”, since of course the Bible of Islam is the Coran, and the reverse holds equally well, the Coran of Christianity being the Bible.

To be sure, religion isn’t the only field in which this kind of pluralization of proper nouns takes place; the phenomenon occurs in the most mundane of activities no less than in the most otherworldly ones, as we shall see. Indeed, capital letters fall by the wayside left and right on Earth as they do in Heaven.

A provocative question was posed by mathematicians Frank Swetz and T. I. Kao in the preface of their little book
Was Pythagoras Chinese?

Indeed, strange though it might seem, it is perfectly possible that the category of
Pythagorases
might have had a member quite a while before the birth of Samos’ most famous native.

In everyday conversations, people unwittingly exploit the device of marking to distinguish individuals who stand out from the crowd from more run-of-the-mill individuals. Among the people who excel in a certain field and gain recognition from their peers, a small minority becomes known beyond just a local circle, perhaps for writing a book, or for being written up in newspapers, for acting on stage, or for making a splash in the world of business. A handful of these accomplished individuals then jump over a yet higher hurdle, perhaps by receiving a prestigious prize, or by having their name appear on the marquee of movie theaters, or by rising to hold an office in state government, by becoming mayor of a mid-size city, by hosting a weekly television show, by excelling in a sport, by making a modest fortune in industry or finance, or even by being “famous for being famous”.

Among these celebrities, only a minority ever have their name listed in a prestigious catalogue of important people, whether it be
Who’s Who
or some kind of encyclopedia. But there is yet another, higher stage of fame, attained only by the cream of the cream of the preceding cream, and this is the stage where one becomes a public category. The names of such individuals, above and beyond designating specific people and their accomplishments, become lexical items that denote abstract categories that can have many members.

A catchy French song called “Le Piano du pauvre” by singer–composer Léo Ferré describes a random Parisian street accordionist as “le Chopin du printemps” — “the Chopin of the springtime”. Both the anonymous accordionist and Frédéric Chopin are being honored here — the former for being an “instance” of the latter, and the latter for having been turned into a category that can have instances. We will call this latter honor “canonization”. Of course, thousands of people besides Chopin have been canonized. As a matter of fact, with a bit of effort one can turn up scads of colorful expressions based on canonizations, such as the following seventy-odd mind-boggling examples (none of which, believe it or not, was dreamt up by your authors):