Made In America - Bill Bryson [156]
In addition to the dread of auto-intoxication, the American consumer faced a positive assault course of other newly minted or rediscovered maladies – pyorrhea, halitosis (popularized by Listerine beginning in 1921), athlete’s foot (a term invented by the makers of Absorbine Jr. in 1928), dead cuticles, scabby toes, iron-poor blood, vitamin deficiency (vitamins had been coined in 1912, but the word didn’t enter the general American vocabulary until the 1920s when advertisers realized it sounded worryingly scientific), fallen stomach, tobacco breath, dandruff, and psoriasis, though Americans would have to wait until the next decade for the scientific identification of the gravest of personal disorders – body odour, a term invented in 1933 by the makers of Lifebuoy soap and so terrifying in its social consequences that it was soon abbreviated to a whispered BO.
The white-coated technicians of American laboratories had not only identified these new conditions, but – miraculously, it seemed – had simultaneously come up with cures for them. Among the products that were invented or rose to greatness in this busy, neurotic decade were Cutex (for those deceased cuticles), Vick’s Vapo Rub, Geritol, Serutan (‘Natures spelled backwards’, as the voice-over always said with somewhat bewildering reassurance, as if spelling a product’s name backwards conferred some medicinal benefit), Noxzema (for which read: ‘knocks eczema’) Preparation H, Murine eyedrops and Dr Scholl’s Foot Aids.*28 It truly was an age of miracles – one in which you could even cure a smoker’s cough by smoking, so long as it was Old Golds you smoked, because, as the slogan proudly if somewhat untruthfully boasted, they contained ‘Not a cough in a carload’. (As late as 1953, L&M was advertising its cigarettes as ‘just what the doctor ordered!’)
By 1927 advertising was a $1.5 billion a year industry in the United States, and advertising people held in such awe that they were asked not only to mastermind campaigns but even to name the products. An ad man named Henry N. McKinney, for instance, named Keds shoes, Karo syrup, Meadow Gold butter and Uneeda Biscuits.10
Product names tended to cluster around certain sounds. Breakfast cereals often ended in -ies (Wheeties, Rice Krispies, Frosties); washing powders and detergents tended to be gravely monosyllabic (Lux, Fab, Tide). It is often possible to tell the era of a product’s development by its ending. Thus products dating from the 1920s and early 1930s often ended in -ex (Pyrex, Cutex, Kleenex, Windex) while those ending in -master (Mixmaster, Toastmaster) generally betray a late 1930s or early 1940s genesis.11 The development of Glo-Coat floor wax in 1932 also heralded the beginning of American business’s strange and longstanding infatuation with illiterate spellings, a trend that continued with ReaLemon juice in 1935, Reddi-Wip whipped cream in 1947 and many hundreds of others since, from Tastee-Freez drive-ins to Toys ‘R’ Us, along with countless others with a Kwik, E-Z or U (as in While-U-Wait) embedded in their titles. The late 1940s saw the birth of a brief vogue for endings in -matic, so that car manufacturers had Seat-O-Matics and Cruise-O-Matics, and even fitted sheets came with Ezy-Matic Corners. Some companies became associated with certain types of names. DuPont, for instance, had a special fondness for words ending in -on. The practice began with nylon – a name that was concocted out of thin air and owes nothing to its chemical properties – and was followed with Rayon, Dacron, Orlon and Teflon, among many others, though in more recent years the company has abandoned the practice and moved into what might be called its Star Trek