Rayon is not a trade-mark, but a generic name: the manufacturers of the different brands distinguish them by special names, usually embodying their own names. Rayon was chosen by the National Retail Dry goods Association in 1924 after various other names had been proposed, e.g., glos. It has been defined by the Federal Trade Commission as “the generic name for manufactured textile fiber or yarn produced chemically from cellulose or with a cellulose base, and for thread, strands or fabric made therefrom, regardless of whether such fiber or yarn be made under the viscose, acetate, cuprammonium, nitrocellulose or other processes.”2 Bakelite, on the contrary, is a trade-mark suggested by the name of the inventor, Leo Hendrik Baekeland. The substance is synthesized from formaldehyde and carbolic acid, and is generally described as a vinyl resin.3 Many trade-names have fanciful and even romantic origins. An example is afforded by veronal, which is of German genesis, though it is familiar in the United States. Veronal was invented by Emil Fischer and Freiherr von Mering, two distinguished chemists. After long work upon the project Mering took a holiday and went to Italy. One day, at Verona, he received a telegram from Fischer saying that the synthesis of the substance had been effected, and the name veronal immediately suggested itself.4 Aspirin, another German invention, had a more prosaic origin. The name is simply a blend of acetyl and spiraeic acid, the latter an old name for salicylic acid. Coca-cola, a compound based on the names of two of the drink’s constituents, was first used by J. S. Pemberton, an Atlanta druggist, in 1886, and was registered as a trade-mark on January 31, 1893. The Coca-Cola Company has been much plagued by imitations, some of them borrowing the word cola and others playing on coke, a common abbreviation for thirty years. The courts have been loath to prohibit others from using cola, for it is descriptive, but in 1930 the Supreme Court of the United States decided that coke is the exclusive property of the Company.1 There was a time when it discouraged the use of coke, for the term was also a name for cocaine, then present in coca-cola in microscopic amount, and the uplifters responsible for the Harrison Act had convinced the country that cocaine was an extremely dangerous drug. But after cocaine was eliminated altogether from the formula, and the alarms about it began to subside, the company found the abbreviation coke a good advertisement, and has since stressed it in its advertising.2 Coke, of course, is a common word in other significances, and is traced by the NED to 1669 in the sense of the product remaining after coal is distilled, but in the sense of a non-alcoholic drink made of vegetable extractives it is now the property of the Coca-Cola Company.
Dr. Pound, in her pioneer study, already cited, attempted a classification of trade-names by methods of coinage, as follows:
Derivatives of proper names: listerine from that of Sir Joseph Lister, maxim (gun) from that of Hiram Maxim, postum from that of C. F. Post.
Shortenings or extensions of descriptive words: jell-o, alabastine, resinol, protectograph, shinola, wooltex, reflecto, wheatena.
Diminutives: wheatlet, toasterette, chiclet.
Compounds: palmolive, willowcraft, waxit, malt-nutrine.
Disguised spellings: prest-o-lite, uneeda, rubifoam, porosknit, holsum, shure-on, pro-phy-lac-tic, pil-o-rest, taystee, klingtite.
Blends: jap-a-lac,1 locomobile, tweeduroy, triscuit, vaporub, eversharp, dam-askeene, cuticura (from cuticle and cure), valspar (from Valentine & Company and spar), philco.
Terms made from initials or other parts of proper names: pebeco from P. Beirsdorf & Company, reo from R. E. Olds.
Arbitrary coinages: kotex, zu-zu, tiz, kryptok.
A lucky hit in coining trade-names establishes a fashion and brings in a host of imitators. Kodak was followed by a great many other terms beginning or ending or both beginning and ending with k, and uneeda had a long progeny, e.g., uwanta, ibuya. In the 20s there was a craze for the -ex ending in arbitrary coinages, and it produced scores of examples, e.g., lux, celotex, pyrex, kleenex, kotex, simplex, laminex, cutex, etc.2 Ten years later master came into fashion as both suffix and prefix, e.g., toastmaster, mixmaster, masterart, masterlite.3
Some of the current coinages show a considerable ingenuity, e.g., klim, the name of a powered milk, which is simply milk backward; flit, a spray for obnoxious insects, suggesting very forcibly their precipitate departure; rem, a cough cure, obviously based on remedy;4 jonteel, a perfume, from the French gentile; toncan, a brand of sheet-iron, produced by reversing the syllables of Canton, the town in Ohio where it is made; and gunk, “a self-emulsifying colloidal detergent solvent.”5 Many trade-names embody efforts to state claims for the product without colliding with the legal prohibition of descriptive terms, e.g., holeproof, eversharp, interwoven, softee, and klingtite.6 The number of new ones registered in the United States in a normal year is about 10,000. Between 1939 and 1943, be-cause of the impact of World War II upon private enterprise, it declined almost a half.1
The copious imitation of new suffixes noted among trade-names is matched in the general speech of the Republic. Printery, traced by the DAE to 1638 in America and not found in England until 1657, seems to have stood alone for a century and a half, but after grocery came in in 1791 it was quickly followed by other forms in -ery, and their coinage continues briskly to this day. The DAE traces bindery to 1810, groggery to 1822, bakery to 1827, creamery to 1858, and cannery to 1870, and marks them all Americanisms. It suggests that Dutch forms in -ij, e.g., bakkerij and binderij, may have produced the earlier examples, and a correspondent suggests that the later ones may owe something to German forms in -ei, e.g., bäckerei and konditorei,2 but the suffix -ery and its attendant -ory are really old in English,3 and buttery, never in general use in the United States, goes back to the Fourteenth Century.4 It is, however, on this side of the water that they have been hardest worked, and that hard working has been frequently noted by both English travelers and native students of language. In the United States, reported one of the former in 1833, “shops are termed stores, and these again figure under the respective designations of John Tomkins’s grocery, bakery, bindery or even wiggery, as the case may be.”5 Bartlett, in the first edition of his Glossary, 1848, listed stemmery as the designation of “a building in which tobacco is stemmed,” and also all the terms just noted save wiggery, which is likewise omitted by the DAE. So is drygoodsery, used by Putnam’s Monthly in 1853 to describe the new A. T. Stewart store in Broadway.1 Since 1900 many additions to the ever-growing list have been reported by lexicographical explorers, e.g., cobblery, renewry (a hat-cleaning shop),2 shoe-renewry or shu-renury,3 shoe-fixery,4 juicery (apparently a stand for the sale of fruit juices),5 cattery,6 rabbitry,7 cyclery, condensery (a milk condensing plant), chickery,8 bowlery,9 sweetery,10 beanery,11 eggery,12 refreshery,13 henry,14 eatery, cakery, car-washery, doughnutery, lunchery, mendery, stitchery,15 nuttery, chowmeinery, drinkery, dancery, hattery, cleanery, drillery (a civil-service cramming school),16 squabery, snackery, breakfastry,17 smeltery and skunkery (a place where skunks are bred for their fur).18 Some of these, of course, show an effort to be waggish, and there is more of that conscious humor in ham-and-eggery, hashery, boozery, nitery (a night-club), hoofery, cocktailery, praisery (a press-agent’s den), sickery (for hospital), learnery (for a girls’ boarding-school) and stompery (a dancing-school).19 Now and then a learned man takes a hand in the business, as when Dr. Franklin H. Giddings launched taboobery and tomtomery, which do not, of course, fall precisely within the pattern, for they designate abstractions.1 Neither does toiletry, which is in very wide use, usually in the plural. The English employ one -ery word that is seldom, if ever, encountered in the United States, to wit, farmery, which is defined by the NED as “the buildings, yards, etc., belonging to a farm,” and traced to 1656. It has never got any lodgment in the United States.2 Neither has servery, which is defined by the NED as “a room from which meals are served” and traced to 1893.3 Booterie and snackerie4 show pseudo-English influence, but are not often encountered. An archaic term, beefery, signifying a packing-plant for beef, is reported by Woodford Heflin.5
Perhaps the most fertile of the latter-day American suffixes is -eria, borrowed from cafeteria. All the lexicographers agree that cafeteria is of Spanish origin,6 but they are vague about the time and place of its entrance into American English, and about its acquirement of a special American meaning. When, in 1927, Phillips Barry discovered it in an obscure dictionary of Cuban Spanish, defined as la tienda en que se vende café por menor, the shop where coffee is sold at retail,7 the problem appeared to be moving toward solution, but it is still to be shown precisely how, when and where cafeteria reached the United States and how it came to acquire the meaning of a self-help eating-place. Says Mr. Barry:
Outside of Cuba and Porto Rico the word is not quoted for American Spanish in lexicons. This [Cuban] cafeteria has no connection with Spanish cafetera, a coffee-pot, but is explained as a new formation on the analogy of Cuban-Spanish bisutería, which Rubio1 correctly calls a loan-word from the French bijouterie. Other words in Cuban Spanish formed in the same manner are platería and joyería, the last an alleged purist substitute for bisutería.2
In a later dictionary of American Spanish, compiled long after Pichardo’s and published after Barry’s paper,3 cafetería is credited, not only to Cuba and Porto Rico, but also to Mexico, and defined as an establecimento donde se sirva esta bebida. This ascription shows some gain in plausibility, for there has been little if any infiltration of Cuban Spanish into the United States, save in the Key West area, and all the available evidence indicates that cafeteria came into American English west of the Alleghanies, where the only Spanish prevailing is of the Mexican variety. The exact place of its birth is in dispute, for though California claims it there is reason to believe that it actually made its first appearance in Chicago at the time of the World’s Fair of 1893. The DAE cites an authority who says that it was in use in California c. 1853, but he adds that it then signified “rather a place for drinking than for eating,” as in the Mexican example just cited. The DAE’s first example in the American sense is from the Chicago Directory for 1894, which listed a Cafetiria Catering Company (note the spelling) at 45 Lake Street. The names and addresses for this directory, in all probability, were gathered in 1893. By 1895 it was listing four cafetirias, and by 1896 one of them (with its name changed to caféteria) had become so prosperous that Chicago gunmen were inspired to crack its safe.4 Meanwhile, the cafeteria had begun to spread, and before the end of 1893 there was at least one in St. Louis. A witness to its existence is Mr. George F. Longdorf, of Oakland, Calif., who says:
I have personal knowledge and positive recollection of the word cafetiria, as it was then spelled, over a self-help restaurant on Pine street, St. Louis, opposite the Merchants’ Exchange, in 1893. Some of my schoolmates patronized it, and Alec Blair, son of Frank P. Blair, called it “the conscience joint” because each patron appraised his own tray and paid the amount without any check or ticket. I have always fancied that it came up the river—from New Orleans, possibly. One person suggested to me that it may have been derived from café and the French verb tirer, to draw, to pull, to reach for. When I saw it the Spanish form cafeteria was not used, and the pronunciation was caf-e-ti’r-i-a.1
Cafetera, in standard Spanish, means a coffee-pot, not a coffeehouse. The Italian caffetiere is of precisely the same meaning, and it is not at all impossible that it, and not the Cuban-Spanish word, suggested cafeteria. There were, in fact, a great many more Italians than Cubans in Chicago in the World’s Fair era. Meanwhile, California continues to claim its origin, and it may be admitted that that great State, if not actually responsible for the word itself, is at least largely responsible for the proliferation of the cafeteria’s progeny. In the early days the -teria ending was always used as an indicator of self-service, but as J. M. Steadman, Jr., has shown,2 its scope began to widen by 1930, and it is now used in many terms signifying establishments in which the customer is waited on by others. Steadman distinguishes three meanings, to wit:
1. “A place where articles are sold on the self-service plan.” Examples: caketeria, candyteria, drugteria, pastreria, cleaneteria (“a place furnishing hot water, soap, cleaning fluids, brushes”), groceteria (grocerteria, groceryteria), healtheteria, drygoodsteria, luncheteria, marketeria, basketeria, mototeria (“a grocerteria on wheels”), restauranteria, shaveteria (“a place where one finds all the things needed for shaving oneself”), shoeteria (“a place where one examines the stock of shoes and selects a pair to one’s liking”), resteteria, casketeria.
2. “A place where certain articles are sold without the self-service plan.” Examples: chocolateria, sodateria, fruiteria, hatateria, kalfateria (“a shoe store”), radioteria, smoketeria.
3. “A place where certain services are rendered —by others, not by the customer himself.” Examples: bobateria (“where hair is bobbed”), valeteria, wrecketeria (“a place where old cars are wrecked and parts sold”).
The majority of such terms, of course, are hardly more than nonce-words, but some of them show signs of sticking as cafeteria itself has stuck. Since Steadman published his list there have been many additions to it, for example, gasteria,1 buffeteria,2 caveteria (a basement restaurant),3 camerateria,4 scarfeteria (a necktie shop),5 danceteria,6 honeyteria,7 sweeteria,8 washerteria (a laundry), icerteria,9 movieteria,10 furnitureteria,11 bootblackateria,12 typewriteria,13 roadateria,14 and garmenteria.15 Others, antedating the Steadman list but omitted from it, are healthateria, millinteria, bargainteria,16 farmateria, cleaniteria, spaghetteria,17 accomateria (a small truck from which vegetables are sold),18 and smoketeria.19
The literature of -teria is extensive, and there have been many contributions to it in American Speech, The pioneer investigator of the suffix was the before-mentioned E. C. Hills (1867–1932), professor of Spanish and later of Romance philology at the University of California.20 There is an extensive article on the cafeteria in the Encyclopedia Britannica,1 which records that a self-service restaurant for men only was established in New York in 1885, and another for both sexes in Chicago in 1891. But neither was called a cafeteria. In July, 1925 the Journal of Home Economics reported an investigation which indicated that the first real cafeteria was set up in Chicago. Phillips Barry, in the paper that I have quoted, shows that the idea of self-service was familiar in the coffee-shops of the Eastern Mediterranean region more than a century ago. In 1941 the American Mercury printed an article2 in which a Los Angeles cafeteria magnate, Clifford E. Clinton by name, was quoted as claiming that his father, Edmund J. Clinton, “once a missionary to China for the Salvation Army,” established in Los Angeles, in 1900, “the world’s first serve-yourself eaterie,” and that “for it the term cafeteria was coined.” As we have seen, there were cafeterias in Chicago and St. Louis at least seven years before this. In American Speech, October, 1940, p. 335 M. C. McPhee reported that cafeterian had come into use (apparently at the University of Nebraska) to signify “a student who visits classes for a week or two before registering in some of them,” but it does not seem to have spread elsewhere.
Among the other American suffixes that have produced notable progeny are -orium and -cade. Of words made of the former I listed the following in AL4, p. 179: beautorium, healthatorium, preventorium, barberatorium, bobatorium, lubritorium, infantorium, hatatorium, motortorium, odditorium, pantorium or pantatorium, printorium, restatorium or restorium, shavatorium, suitatorium and pastorium. To these may be added corsetorium,3 hot-dogatorium,4 parentorium,5 furnituorium (a furniture store), hairitorium (a store dealing in wigs and hair goods), puritorium (a Jewish ritual bath),6 shoetorium,1 theatovium,2 sonotorium,3 eatatorium and servitorium.4 The analogous -arium has meanwhile produced vocarium (a collection of gramophone records of the human voice),5 oceanarium (an underwater zoo),6 abortarium (a hospital specializing in abortions),7 ritualarium (a Jewish ritual bath, identical with a puritorium, just noted),8 and terrarium (“a covered glass globe or fish-tank containing flowers and plants to be grown indoors during the Winter”).9 Pveventorium, which is l
isted by the NED Supplement, was coined by the late Nathan Straus in the early 90s as a euphemism for sanitorium to designate a hospital for the early treatment of consumptives.10 Odditorium was launched by Robert L. Ripley to designate an exhibition of oddities at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–34, but his claim to its invention has been challenged by Allen Walker Read, who reports that there was an odditorium in Kingston-on-Thames, a village near London, before World War I.11 Latinate suffixes in -ium and -ory have also been put to use by the English. Grose noted nicknackatory, in the sense of a toy-shop, in his “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” 1785, and Robert Southey recorded in his Commonplace Book12 that an opificium for the sale of “the celebrated Belleish Convent soap” was maintained in his time at 116 Pall Mall, London.13 Planetarium, to designate a machine for exhibiting the motion of the heavenly bodies, is probably an Americanism, though the DAE does not so mark it. The first example of its use offered by both the DAE and the NED comes from John Adams’s diary, 1774. The University of Chicago has lately revived a medieval monkish term to designate its Ricketts Scriptorium, “the only establishment in the United States engaged exclusively in manuscript lettering and illumination.” When, in 1938, the first volume of the DAE was published, the lay brothers of the scriptorium prepared illuminated copies for King George of England, for President Roosevelt, for Sir William A. Craigie, the chief editor of the dictionary, and for Dr. James R. Hulbert, his chief associate.
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