British and Australian people - taser?

[ensiform]

I am nonplussed every time I play 'taser' and have it come up rare.  To an American, this word is pretty common.  I know these devices aren't used with as much brutal avidity in the rest of the English-speaking world, but surely the word is known?  I feel like it must be equivalent to the word 'arse' in America - absolutely no one says it, but nearly everyone knows it.  So, how about it - do you know 'taser'?

[nineoaks]

I often think of this word when playing, but have never even tried it, because I thought it was a trademarked capital 'T' word. However, if it's allowed as 'rare,' maybe not.



9oaks

[Morbius]

I'd say it's certainly common in Australia.

[mkenuk]

These things are used by police and military all over the world, so I would say the word was well known everywhere.
'Taser' is a trademark, however, and I suspect that may be why Chi regards it as rare.

MK

[Morbius]

If it's considered to be a trademark that hasn't yet made the transition to generic usage, then I'd have thought it wouldn't be allowed in Chi at all.  To me, the fact that it is allowed (albeit as a rare word) indicates that Chi considers it to be a word in its own right.   

[Alan W]

Strictly speaking, our rule is that, regardless of proprietary status, we don't allow a word normally written with a capital letter. In practice though, the rule applied is more like we don't allow a word that is almost always written with a capital letter. So we accept quite a few words that are sometimes written in all lower case letters, even if they are more often written with an initial capital. I'm especially likely to accept a word if at least one standard dictionary lists it without a capital.

It could be argued that a proprietary name is not a word at all - that it is a name. But I don't think such an argument applies to taser, since it is normally used as if it were a word: it can be either a noun or a verb, and in either case is frequently inflected in accordance with normal English rules. If the desires of TASER International were respected by everyone, the issue wouldn't arise: the word would be written all in capitals and their products would be known as "TASER Conducted Electrical Weapons" or "TASER CEWs" for short. Hence we would never see tasers, tasered or tasering.

Interestingly, the US English version of the online Oxford Dictionary has a capital T for the noun, but the verb is in lower case. The "British and World English" entry has both verb and noun in lower case, although the noun is still labeled as a trademark.

I did consider whether taser should be common, several years ago. My conclusion was:

So I think it is probably time taser was treated as a common word. However, the verb forms, tasered, tased, etc, are used much less frequently and should probably remain rare.

However I didn't actually change anything. (Probably the reason I overlooked it was that the issue was raised well into a thread on another topic.) I still think taser should become common, but I'm not so sure about leaving tasered and tasering as rare: I feel maybe they should be common too. Any thoughts?

[Tom44]

If taser is common (which I agree with) then the other forms should be common as well.

[Morbius]

Tase and tased are also allowed in Chi as rare words, which raises the question of whether tase/tased or taser/tasered is the accepted verb form.  If they're both used, then is one more common than the other?

[Tom]

I guess the same question must arise over the word hoover? The British, of course, commonly use 'to hoover' to indicate vacuuming. Hoover is obviously a proprietary name but has made it way into British English as a common verb. How does Chi view this?

[Alan W]

Chi has always allowed hoover, hoovered and hoovering.

[birdy]

I agree with Tom that all forms of the verb taser should be common.  Unfortunately, it seems to be used quite often these days.  I suppose it's better than "shoot or "shot."

[Alan W]

In answer to Morbius's question, it appears that the verb forms tasered and tasering are fairly frequently used around the world these days. However, the forms tase, tased and tasing are little used outside the US and, even there, not so widely used as taser (as a verb), tasered and tasering.

So I'm going to make taser, tasered and tasering common.

[ensiform]

Thanks for the as always well-reasoned and researched response, Alan!

Don't tase me, bro!