The year nineteen hundred and twenty-five is interesting for a few reasons. In the world of art, 1925 was the year that the Paris exposition “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes” opened, which nowadays is agreed to have been the beginnings of Art Deco. Literature saw the publication of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” In international politics, Adolf Hitler published “Mein Kampf.” The automobile, already well established, was bolstered by the founding of Chrysler Corporation. Technologically, the first form of television was demonstrated by a man named Charles Jenkins. And photography became more of a pastime of well-off people when the first Leica cameras appeared for sale. Even then they were very well made and vastly more expensive than any competitor.
But of course the important stuff that happened in 1925 had little to do with any of those events. What I mean, of course, is that the word “chewy” first appeared in a dictionary. It’s almost beyond belief that English got by for so many centuries without “chewy,” but there you have it. Maybe until about that time everything tended to be pretty chewy, and without comparisons nobody really noticed.
Something odd happened with the word “gavel” in 1925. The noun, meaning the hammer used by a judge, already existed, but in that year the word also became a verb, as in “to gavel a meeting to order.” Unrelated to 1925, but related to “gavel,” that word was also used to mean the distribution of land by a system called “gavelkind,” a medieval system that I didn’t bother to look up. “Gavel” also means collecting harvested corn and piling it up (as opposed, I guess, to putting it in wagons or baskets or whatever). And not only that; “gavel” also meant (in the past) to seize property to pay a tax bill, and/or to pay rent for land.
But let’s gavel this message back to order and point out that the word “makeover” is not a product of reality TV; it’s been around since 1925. Not only that, but “dream team” was first recorded in 1925 — that team might have included at least one “superstar,” another 1925 word.
And finally, 1925 marked important milestones in the world of consumer products and their trademarks. “Kleenex,” “Tootsie Roll,” and “Wheaties” were all trademarked that year, as well as one oddity: “zipper.” The zipper that was trademarked in 1925didn’t refer to the fastener we know as a zipper. What was trademarked was a piece of footwear (a boot) that happened to use the fastener, not the fastener itself. This mistake probably became apparent pretty quickly, and naturally went to court, and sure enough, the ruling was that the trademark applied to the boot, not to the fastener. It would be like showing up at the patent office with a model of your new invention and hearing them say “OMG, look at that, you’ve invented an anti-gravity machine you want to patent!” Whereupon you’d reply “oh no, not that, I wanted you to see this cool cardboard box I invented; I just put that anti-gravity gadget in there because I needed a place to put it.”
