OK, I’m over the “iPad = iFeminineHygiene” meme that’s been going around the net since the launch of the iPad. For some it’s a giggle, for others it’s a serious reason to criticise Apple. For me, it smacks of over sensitivity and a puerile, juvenile argument.
A while ago, Alex Barrett on Twitter wrote:
As a woman, can I just say that this whole #iTampon #iPad thing is incredibly JUVENILE. Who started this, Beavis and Butthead?
As a gay man, I couldn’t agree more. A casual search reveals all these other horrifying words that end in pad and must be some terrible play against feminine hygiene products:
- keypad
- footpad
- helipad
- kneepad
- notepad
- mousepad
- scorepad
- touchpad
- trackpad
- launchpad
The conspiracy abounds to destroy the sacrosanct use of “pad” as a shortened form of various feminine hygiene products. A war on the English language must be declared!
Or alternatively, people could perhaps realise that sometimes a name is just a name, and sometimes a word is just a word, and sometimes they’re being too precious. Words get used for more than one thing: that’s the joy that is English. Most people these days hate banks. I love them – I love sitting on banks with headphones on watching the river go by. Most people eat their sandwiches with relish – me, I’m on a no-carb diet, so instead of eating a sandwich with relish I’d instead relish spreading a bit of chutney on a piece of meat and throwing the bread away.
Please, let’s not let the juveniles who like to giggle at fart jokes and live their lives in a double entendre subvert what would otherwise be a discussion about the technical merits of future shock.
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Preston,
The problem with your analogy of the iPad in comparison with all the other words ending in -pad is that those words all describe what the use for the “pad” is in the prefix. The iPad does not have a descriptive prefix, it just uses the “i” that Apple has trademarked to refer to the user. No wonder all the feminine hygiene jokes are made. Apple should have thought about the name a bit more. They should have tried iScroll, iTablet, iMemo, or iSlab (joking).
Brian
I can see the point of this line of thinking, but I’d also argue that the “i” in an Apple product has become so ubiquitous that the title product name could be interpreted (as I did) to be completely clear – it’s “my ‘pad” or a “personal ‘pad”.
Perhaps the other aspect of this is that “pad” may more be a term in some countries than others for feminine hygiene products. It’s not something I’ve heard as a descriptive term here in Australia – but again, I may just not have heard it within my own circles of friends and family.
What’s likely to be the case though is that somewhere between the two views about the name is the truth – i.e., for some people it will sound jarring and represent the wrong thing, for others it won’t.