• DahGangalang@infosec.pub
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    9 months ago

    Wait, are these the dates when the brand that eventually was deemed a “common word” were first trade marked? I was reading this as the years they were deemed common words.

    Cause 2011 is WAYYYY too early for zoom to be common. If anything, that would’ve been Skype on 2011. Similar thing for Tupperware and zipper.

    Also, wtf was heroin’s common name before being branded heroin? Lol, also, I can’t help but imagine heroin got its name as some kind of “there’s a hero in every needle” marketing campaign.

    • groet@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      year the brand name was first introduced.

      It says so in the legend. Zoom has been a word for a long time but it now also means “participate in a (video) teleconference”, which is a new meaning directly linked to the zoom software released in 2011. When a word became generic is usually very hard to pinpoint exactly (except for zoom that was 2020)

      For heroin: I don’t think there was heroin before the introduction of the heroin brand. Bayer literally invented the substance. (Wikipedia says it was invented 23 years earlier in Britain from morphine, but the inventer didn’t do anything with it so it was reinvented later). It was also not a drug you take to get high, it was an over the counter cough suppressant; no needle or spoon or lighter involved. Wild times for sure…

      • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        It was diacetyl morphine before Bayer marketed it. Fun fact; the acetyl groups get cleaved before it binds to a receptor so it’s just plain old morphine again.

      • DahGangalang@infosec.pub
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        9 months ago

        Derp, thanks for pointing out the legend. Totally missed it as I gave the thing a once over.

        But also, obviously this means heroin’s name must come from “a hero in every pill”

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      It’s from the German word “heroisch”, which is basically “heroic”. They used it being a homonym for “heroine” to use women heroes or Valkyrie in marketing for a bit, because it’ll save you from that nasty cough.

      It didn’t really go by anything before, since it’s not something super easy to make, and so the first people to really make a lot of it was Bayer, and they named it heroin.

      Before heroin people had morphine, and heroin had been made as “diamorphine”, but it just wasn’t really a thing.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        In the 80’s there was a brand of cough suppressant pills with codeine (prescription only) called Tussigon, as codeine is a an anti-tussive (anti-cough).