My students and I are looking at/for brand names that are actually words in not-directly-related-to-their-products ways. An example is Pampers, which my students were convinced actually meant "diapers" (interestingly, they believed that a "pamper" was a diaper of ANY brand, which gave me an idea of how much further the word has penetrated into the English language since I was a kid with diaper-wearing siblings). They were genuinely shocked to learn that "pamper" ever had another meaning. "Crest" is another good example. And "Bounty." This is my new roundabout way of fostering vocab learning; these are words that they actually already know, they just have different meanings. (and they can participate in finding the words-homework earlier this week was going home and looking at what you have in your pantry. Everyone seemed enthusiastic). You can even talk about word roots using brands (Duracell, which we talked about today, is a good example). I'm running out of brand names, though- I guess I don't pay as much attention as I used to when I had a TV and watched commercials. Can anyone think of any others?
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Hmm .. "Kleenex"?
ReplyDeleteOr "Netflix"?
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