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Where are you from? In Britain I'm pretty sure I've never heard anyone say "Legos", it sounds very American to me.
by eigenket 6y ago
Where are you from? In Britain I'm pretty sure I've never heard anyone say "Legos", it sounds very American to me.
- tragomaskhalos 6y agoIt seems to be a fairly clear-cut geographical divide - Americans always pluralise, Britons never do. Without knowing but based on other lexical splits, I'd expect the majority of the rest of the Anglophone world to follow British usage, with Canada going either one way or the other. Usually Americans can cite 17c usage as a precedent - not in this case !
- jerf 6y agoMy main point here is that you probably don't run around saying LEGO, in all caps, not singular vs plural. I understand why the LEGO corporation does it, but it's their problem, not ours, and we don't really need unpaid lego consultants running around lecturing people about the "correct" way to refer to them.
- eigenket 6y agoYeah I was just surprised by the assertion that >"Legos" is clearly in common usage Given that I don't ever hear people using it. Personally I get faintly annoyed by people saying "legos" the same as I would by people saying "sheeps" instead of sheep when referring to multiple, although I don't think I've ever corrected anyone over it.
- hprotagonist 6y agoi remember being galled by it in the late 80s, so this debate, at least, has been going on for some time.
- munificent 6y ago> Given that I don't ever hear people using it. I certainly do. The people around you are not a uniform sample of all communities on Earth.
- eigenket 6y agoThat was exactly my point. The guy was saying people shouldn't correct an "incorrect" thing which is in common usage, but I was trying to emphasise that it isn't common usage everywhere.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoI think it's fairly obvious why they want people to refer to them as a brand—they don't want to lose their trademark. If LEGO becomes so generic as to lose its association with the company that created it, then they lose out to all of the copycat companies. Velcro has done the same ("hook and loop, one side's a hook, the other's a loop"...).
- 1024core 6y ago> My main point here is that you probably don't run around saying LEGO, in all caps, not singular vs plural. WHAT? DOESN'T EVERYBODY SHOUT WHEN THEY SAY LEGO??
- em-bee 6y agowe do when we step on them
- mitchdoogle 6y agoStrange because as an American I've almost always heard to them referred as Legos. As a kid, my friends and I said, "let's play with Legos". My parents would say " get these legos off the floor". Seems odd to me to think of these phrases without the "s" on lego
- jjav 6y agoYes, it's always "legos" when referring to the pieces (unless singular one piece), in my world.
- eigenket 6y agoI have a pet theory - in north america you have a popular snack called an eggo (pluralised to eggos) thats basically a waffle. I think americans started calling lego legos because they were already calling eggos eggos. In the uk and europe generally we don't have eggos, so we don't have legos.
- em-bee 6y agothe catchphrase from the advertisement is "leggo my eggo", where leggo means "let go" which can't have an s appended. i have never had them so i am not sure, but i don't think they are that popular, and i haven't seem them referred to in plural
- gbear605 6y agoAs a kid, I heard people say the phrase “legos my eggos”, (since the “leggo” had lost al of its association with “let go”).
- j4yav 6y agoPlease, the Eggo corporation would prefer you refer to them as one EGGO or multiple EGGO waffles (tm)
- eigenket 6y agoInterestingly the company initially wanted people to call them "Froffles", but people apparently called them "eggos" due to the fact that they taste eggy. Then the company changed the name to "eggo" to reflect that. I checked the wiki page and thought the contrast between the two approaches is interesting.