This week: Companies pay millions of dollars to have new words created for their products. Some of those new words become something more than just another brand name and instead acquire a kind of cache that turns them into a symbol of belonging. Like this week's word - Kodachrome.
Color Positive
Advertising, as we know it today, is a twentieth-century invention. Prior to that, advertising mostly told people what a product did or how they could use it. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, however, the notion that a marketing campaign should tell a story in order to create an emotional resonance in the consumer had begun to take hold in the early Madison Avenue advertising companies. By the time the Eastman Kodak company was ready to debut their newest color film1, those same advertising companies had their campaigns ready to launch.
The product promised to be affordable, it promised to be easy to use, it promised that people would be able to capture every memory, and, most importantly, it promised to do in glorious, true to life color. But it needed a name. Fortunately, just a few years before, engineer John Capstaff had created the technology that would lead to new product. When he did so, he took an obscure, slightly sciency word for color, appended it to the back of the company name, and, voila, Kodachrome was born. Well, kind of.
In truth, Capstaff was not the first person to name a color film ~chrome. That honor goes to the Lumiere brothers who, in 1903, patented their Autochrome film. Prior to this usage, chrome, in English at least, was just another word for color. From Etymonline:
1800, "chromium," from French chrome, the name proposed by Fourcroy and Haüy for a new element, from Greek khrōma "color"; so called because it makes colorful compounds.
In the intervening century, chrome had been used as a suffix only a couple of times. Or, rather, it had remained a noun but had had two common prefixes attached to it, poly~ and mono~. However, once the 1935 version of Kodachrome had made its way into the world and proved successful, other companies hurried to jump on the bandwagon.
Before too long, ~chrome had become a suffix indicating a color slide film (aka a color positive film). From there, both the suffix and adjective usages became more and more widespread making their way into several industries by way of paints and light-related technologies until, in the modern era, Google coopted it as a brand name for its browser, once again making chrome's noun form the most common usage2.
This transition from one part of speech to another is nothing new. English words do this all the time. In fact, the ease with which words can change form, as well as how easily new words can be coined in the first place, are major hallmarks of English as a language. In other words, those are features, not bugs. But Kodachrome is interesting because it's a rare portmanteau in which one of the component words isn't really a word at all.
Somewhat famously, in the late 1800s, when George Eastman needed a name for his newly founded camera company, he chose the name Kodak. Over the years, how, exactly, he came up with the name is more myth than truth but the story goes that, as an avid outdoorsman, Eastman wanted a name that was strong and rugged sounding. It needed to be short and to not have any other product associations. Hence, Kodak.
But back to Kodachrome. Over the next century, the film delivered on all its promises. So much so that by the time Paul Simon3 used it as the title and central theme of his 1973 song, he didn't need to tell people what it was, everybody already knew. Kodachrome had achieved the highest honor4 a marketing word can attain - it had become so synonymous with its product that it no longer needed to tell a story to create resonance with the consumers. They already knew the story and they already wanted to be part of it, to use the product to make their own version of the story.
They give us the nice, bright colors,
Give us the greens of summer,
Make us think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
All good things come to an end, however. Somewhat infamously, Kodak struggled to make the transition to digital technology and ended up declaring bankruptcy in 20125. Kodachrome, unfortunately, lay among the many casualties of the company's struggles. It was discontinued in 2009.
I got a Nikon camera,
I love to take a photograph,
Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away
Notes & Addendums:
I had to cut something like 600 words out of this article just to get it to the usual five-minute reading length. So, I wanted to link just a few of my sources and some further reading for the truly curious:
Shameless Self-Promotion
By now you all know about 91 Days and that it's photos; Week 10 has been posted and Week 11 will be up on Friday.
My story Ai, Robot, about an artificial person who struggles to follow her duty, is up on Amazon for $.99 USD or free if you are a member of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Kodachrome is what we call a portmanteau, a word re-purposed by Lewis Carrol to mean, “there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Here is just the start of an enormous rabbit hole about portmanteaus, neologisms, and other blended words in English.
From the Archives
From all the way back in February of 2020 comes a letter about another time I wrote about colors, the best color, in fact: gold.
Color positive film is what used to be known as slide film. When you hold it up to the light, you see the image as a true-color image. In other words, it’s the opposite of negative film.
A lot of this can be seen by playing with the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Sorting the search results by dates reveals a steady increase in both the uses and derivations of chrome over the twentieth century.
There's another line in the song, "everything looks worse in black and white." Simon habitually changes this to "better" when he performs live and says he doesn't remember which way he originally wrote it. But Kodachrome's advertising hinged on getting people to buy more expensive color positive film over cheaper black-and-white negative film, so I suspect it was the album version.
I really wanted to make the case that Kodachrome had become, for a while, a generic noun like band-aid or kleenex, but it didn't pass the capitalization test. Every example I could find in the various corpora I checked had it capitalized indicating people knew it as a branded word.
The terrible irony being that they invented the digital camera.