Geek Trivia: Tale of the tape (player)

What is the official, Sony-approved plural form of Walkman?

It’s not Walkmans. It’s not Walkmen. The official plural of Walkman is Walkman personal stereos. Seriously.

There’s no one specific reason why Sony sidestepped the issue of pluralization, but a significant contributing factor is international trademark law. While Walkman may be a recognized Sony trademark, Walkmen may not have stood up in court as an equivalent pluralization — especially when translations are involved — so Sony set out a marketing and legal directive that made sure no reseller or affiliate would ever advertise or sell Walkmans or Walkmen, just Walkman personal stereos.

It’s also worth noting that the Walkman’s success was much more a triumph of marketing than technology, as Sony merely used off-the-shelf tech to create the personal stereo that debuted on July 1, 1979. The name Walkman is actually a play off a previous Sony product, the Pressman, or portable cassette recorder marketed primarily to journalists (as in the press).

Sony’s chairman demanded a similar device with headphones so he could listen to music on transoceanic airplane flights. After mocking up such a device, Sony recognized that it had some commercial potential and quickly got the ball rolling on the Walkman.

Except that the aforementioned chairman reputedly hated the name Walkman, which is why the company originally marketed the device as the Soundabout in the United States, the Storaway in Britain, and the Freestyle in Sweden. Apocryphally, Sony may have also worried that Walkman sounded too much like a crude translation of the product’s Japanese name, and thus would not inspire confidence in the Walkman if consumers thought that Sony couldn’t even get the name right.

Of course, the Walkman name — and product — proved wildly popular, so much so that most people informally refer to all portable cassette players as Walkmans (or Walkmen), regardless of manufacturer. Meanwhile, Sony has embraced the -man nomenclature, producing the Watchman portable TV, the Discman portable CD player (AKA the CD Walkman), and the Talkman voice translation software, which runs on the PlayStation Portable handheld video game console.

All of them, one assumes, also have prescribed, Sony-approved pluralizations, making them another example of strained techno-grammar — and linguistically entertaining Geek Trivia.

The Quibble of the Week

If you uncover a questionable fact or debatable aspect of this week’s Geek Trivia, just post it in the discussion area of the article. Every week, yours truly will choose the best post from the assembled masses and discuss it in a future edition of Geek Trivia.

This week’s quibble comes from the June 20 edition of Geek Trivia, “The ice is right.” TechRepublic member Asset Manager disputed my conjugation of a chemical name for water.

“I think the reference to ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ is incorrect. According to my Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (an ancient edition: 51st), it should be simply hydrogen oxide.”

Well, yes and no: In 2005, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) declared that any chemical conjugation that accurately described the chemical was acceptable. The IUPAC prefers hydrogen oxide, hydroxic acid, or hydroxilic acid for describing water. However, a whole host of alternatives is acceptable, including hydrogen hydroxide, oxidane, or hydrohydroxic acid. I invoked the rather overstated dihydrogen monoxide as a subtle reference to this hoax, which aims to bolster chemistry awareness and common sense.

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The Trivia Geek, also known as Jay Garmon, is a former advertising copywriter and Web developer who’s duped TechRepublic into underwriting his affinity for movies, sci-fi, comic books, technology, and all things geekish or subcultural.

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