A pile of LEGO, not "legos", unless you are a halfwit.
Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow is all outraged that Lego is trying to get Americans to start referring to its products properly.
...you are treated to a ten-second view of a screen in which a lawyerly paragraph scolds you viciously for abusing the Lego trademark by calling the toys "Legos." They ask you to stop calling them Legos and switch to the far more mellifluous "Lego Bricks or Toys." You know what? Real people in the real world call the toys Legos. Real customers. People don't rearrange their idiom to suit trademark lawyers. Deal.
The "vicious scolding" is actually pretty innocuous:
The word LEGO is a brand name, and is very special to all of us in the LEGO group of Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our products as "LEGO bricks or toys" and not "LEGOS"...
It's interesting seeing how this little piece by Mr Doctorow has been taken. On the one hand, you have the Americans, who've been misnaming the individual blocks "legos" for years, and who see this is as a "look at those evil trademark lawyers and their contempt for customers" story. What a brilliant example of corporate stupidity, they declare. Bloody Europeans telling us how to refer to their products? How dare they!
On the other you've got the rest of the world (which has been mildly annoyed for years about the issue) retorting that Cory is nuts, Lego is right, and could you Americans just get with the programme already? "Lego" already encompasses the plural - ie "go pick up your Lego", "bugger it I've just stood on a Lego brick" etc. An individual brick has never been "a Lego". "Legos" sounds daft, and always has. It'd be like calling the clay bricks on a house "clays".
I'm as open and tolerant as the next person, but Lego is right. I don't think I'm exaggerating here when I say that referring to Lego bricks as Legos is the first sign of the Apocalypse. No, really. Every time they call an individual brick "a lego" it provokes the Danes a little closer to open insurrection...
And the Lego company is simply trying to help Americans not sound like fools. The pathetically-misguided notion of calling them "legos" is a learned behaviour. With appropriate counselling and therapy, it can be unlearned.
Sadly, of course, the whole thing is utterly futile, because no-one likes to be told that what they're doing is "wrong", and in language there's no such thing as "wrong", anyway. Only "new". And also, because they've got this "our country is THE WORLD'S ONLY SUPERPOWER" superiority complex going, Americans are, as a people, even more stubborn than most. So, any crazy whim that takes them will inevitably get absorbed into English. Fo' shizzle.
Lego is fighting an unwinnable uphill battle. In a Sisyphean way. (I was going to say it was fighting "a Sisyphean uphill battle", but the mental image of Sisyphus fighting with one hand whilst balancing the enormous boulder on his head was just completely ridiculous.)
The company is still completely right, though: calling the bricks "legos" makes you sound like a total fuckwit.
(Memo to Lego: you can get stuffed, though, if you think I'm going to type your company name in capitals each time.)
