Ask for It by Name!

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s an all-terrain vehicle that will bring out your inner Lewis & Clark and take you to the top of life’s mountains. Or it’s a gas-guzzling behemoth too wide for the road that menaces anyone driving a normal car. Most vehicles are largely a matter of personal taste or utilitarian choice, but the Hummer is an in-your-face social statement that inspires either longing looks of envy or muttered curses of annoyance.

Much of the Hummer’s appeal, to those who find it appealing, comes from its military lineage, as does its name. The original “H-1″ Hummer was simply a civilian version of the U.S. military’s High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle, made famous during the first Gulf War in 1991 and better known in the military as the “Humvee.” The more recent “H-2″ and “H-3″ Hummers, produced by General Motors (who bought the original Humvee manufacturer), are tamed-down, more consumer-oriented versions (gas engine instead of diesel, Bose stereo, etc.), with little in common with the H-1.

There are two different stories, one a bit goofy, the other perhaps a little too dignified, about the origin of the name “Vaseline,” the trade name of the petroleum jelly invented by Robert A. Chesebrough in 1870.

The goofy story is that Chesebrough, looking around for containers in which to store his invention, swiped a few of his wife’s flower vases. Once he decided that the time had come to name his new goo, he simply combined “vase” with the then-popular chemical suffix “line.”

The more somber, we-are-serious-scientists version eschews flower vases and credits Chesebrough with combining “Wasser,” the German word for water, with “elaion,” Greek for “oil.”

If this account is true, Chesebrough deserves even more credit for mixing the German and Greek and coming up with “Vaseline,” rather than “Wasserelaion,” which would have been the worst name since 7 Up was initially marketed under the name “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.”

So take your pick of the two stories, but don’t use “Vaseline” as a generic term for petroleum jelly. It’s still a trademark of Unilever.