Help for readers with English as second language

Help for readers with English as second language
I read a novel, in which the writer mentioned, that he as an impulse had bought a Remington. My first thought, that it was a rifle, but it was not that kind of story, so I settled for a typewriter, as he was a writer. But then he came home and used it to shave himself.

This makes me think of a strange trend. Nobody writes of a paper napkin without telling exactly what brand it is. A headache pill is given the exact name from the pharmacy.
Why do we always have this specified. In movies it is understandable, because the factories bribe the producers, to have their products mentioned.

My impression is, that people are brainwashed to always mention the name. "Dear little Alfred, do not just as for a chocolate bar, but remember to ask for an Original Santa Claus Bar, this will make you happy, and make the manufacturer happy and wealthy."

I can read Dickens, Austen and other writhers from the nineteenth century without having to guess what they are talking about, but will readers in the 22nd century know the names of our pills, will they have to guess whether we talk about a sleeping pill or a headache pill.

I have a story, that seems not to want to be finished, but there I will try to make it easier for English reader by writing not just centigrade but also Fahrenheit, so they will not have to calculate, like I often have to.

But here is a little help to continental readers:
If the text says 122 Fahrenheit, you first deduct 32. then you can see how much is above water's. freezing point That is 90 Fahrenheit. And as 9 Fahrenheit equals 5 centigrades, we can see the result: 50 centigrades.

If you ask an Englishman about his weight (of course one does not ask an English woman such a question) he may answer: 12 stones. This is easy enough, just multiply 12 with 6.350 kg,
Result: 75,2 kg. Why did he not say so? Brainwash!

But if you ask an American man he will give his answer in pounds.

I think, Yenz, that this difficulty is not so much one about English as a foreign language, as a cultural one.

That brand names are specific to countries is well known, and the manufacturers attempts to rationalise this leads to snickers from the audience. There once was a chocolate bar called Marathon in the UK, named, I imagine to indicate how long the bar would take to eat. The manufacturers decided to change this in the UK to Snickers, because that was the name it had been sold under for many years elsewhere, but this sounds so much like 'Knickers' that the idea took a fair amount of abuse. The bar is still called Snickers here though.

Interestingly, with the malleability of language, trade manes become synonymous with their product, I think most readers of English would recognise 'Thermos' flask to the extent that it no longer needs a capital letter.

Within the spanko community there are often references to Cracker Barrel paddles, or just CB paddles. This confused me as Cracker Barrel used to be a brand of mature cheese here, and no paddles were involved in it. ( Actually I do recall making a large cheeseboard in woodwork class at school, and thinking back that would have been a fearsome implement) Of course, once you know it ceases to be an issue, but I do take the point about use of trade names in stories, and I think I avoid them when writing.

Yenz, your argument seems a little confusing - or perhaps confused. First off, just because a brand name becomes generic doesn't mean that people are 'brainwashed' into buying that brand. In the UK most of us talk about 'hoovering' the carpet - but we're just as likely to do it with a Dyson or a Miele.

"Nobody writes of a paper napkin without telling exactly what brand it is." Don't they? I'm assuming you mean a paper tissue rather than a napkin - and I've never written about a paper tissue (not that I do so very often) without calling it just that. No brand name.

Then, you say that we Brits have been 'brainwashed' into giving our weight in stones and pounds. No, that's custom - just as we still mostly use inches, feet, yards and miles for measurement, rather than metres or kilometres. After all, you Danes still use the krone in purchasing, whereas your German neighbours use the euro. So have you been brainwashed - or have they?

Brand-names show up in literature well before the 20th century. In Trollope, for example, you'll find people consulting 'Bradshaw' - meaningless today, but at the time well-known as the standard published railway timetable.

And if you listen to BBC radio, you'll find the UK daily temperature is invariably given in centigrade. While in the US the poor brainwashed Americans are still using fahrenheit...

Dickens could describe several ways of serving beer without mentioning the brewers name. Now we can see a lot of descriptions, where somebody enters a bar and asks for a specific brand of beer. I can see, why a connoisseur is shown asking for a special wine with the year specified, but a bottle of beer!. 150 years from now the brewery may not exist, and the reader, does not know, whether it is a porter or a soft drink, that is mentioned.

All the more reason to drink and write about Scotch...the brands are with us forever.

Yenz, I suggest that you heed not only the wise words of PhilK but also those of George Bernard Shaw who once said that: 'England and America are two countries divided by a common language'.

It's ironic that a Dane should be pointing out the idiosyncrasies of the English language. English has not only imported a large number of words from Norse but it has also imported elements of grammar and syntax. That represents a profound linguistic influence and Norse, or can we say Old Danish, has been second only to French in the reshaping of the English language.

I occasionally use a brand name to convey something about a character - rather than just open a cold beer, the protagonist will open a cold Michelob Light, because he's a working class Joe.

Stephen King used brand names to great effectiveness in his early novels. We the readers recognized these brand names, and so came to think, Why, the people in this novel are just ordinary folks like us. Except they were battling ghosts or the undead, discovering alien spacecraft, or were the surviving few in a pandemic. The horror became more real because it wasn't happening in some faraway place a long time ago. It was happening in your own town to people like you.

We use brand names a lot down here. A Victa was a lawnmower for years. Eskies are containers for keeping food and drinks cold and we generally call duvets donnas. I do try where I can to actually use the proper names for things when I write, because I try to make my settings relatively generic so that people no matter where they are can relate to them. One concession I make to the way we outside of the US spell things is that when someone uses the word Mum it is spelled with a 'u' not an 'o'.