Quote:
Originally Posted by vivaldirules
Maybe liseuse isn't the best name for it but "ebook reader" hardly seems ideal (that would be me, thank you). Nor "ebook display" (sounds like a dumb monitor). Since no one that I know in the nonvirtual world has one yet, as far as I can tell, except for me, it seems perfectly reasonable to consider new ideas for a name. I think adopting liseuse would be unlikely. Okay, impossible - at least in the U.S. Maybe they'll all soon be called Kindles.
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seems likely, like kleenex and frigidaire became genericised. in france it might well be liseuse though, unless amazon starts to sell them here (we say "kleenex" in french as well
although "kindle" doesn't really roll off the tongue in a french accent).
for the malcontents who reject the use of "liseuse", it did actually emerge from a legitimate, sincere discussion searching for a good generic word for a device (other than "device" obviously), and while it is
possible that "liseuse" doesn't have much future in english (although, with moz's efforts, i'm not so sure
), in french its use in several different places would indicate that it *already* has been at least partially adopted, and perhaps is not familiar to everyone simply because the devices themselves remain relatively unknown (none of my friends had ever heard of a dedicated reading device of any sort, much less had a name for it ; so whatever word i used when i first mentioned it to them i had to explain. now if i say "ma liseuse" they know what i mean).
it's still early enough days (in terms of general public awareness, at least) that the vocabulary is in the process of being created / defined, i think, and possibly discussions like this are part of that process (it doesn't bother me at all ; i like language, etymology, and neologisms, and i can have conversations about words all day long
). i'm sure there were also some refractaries back in the day who obstinately insisted on saying "paper handkerchief", arguing that "kleenex" was a barbaric nonsense...
this particular thread did get somewhat derailed by the discussion of the term, but i do notice that a significant portion of the derailment is the
protestations against the use of the word, more than the explanation...