Author Topic: Should "Styrofoam" have a capital "S"?  (Read 16491 times)

katrina90925

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Should "Styrofoam" have a capital "S"?
« on: September 17, 2011, 03:25:00 PM »
Good day.

I am an editor of our school publication. I edited one of my co-editors' articles, correcting the capital "S"of the word "styrofoam" to a lower case . Then he told me that "Styrofoam" is a patented name and should be capitalized. But again, I remember that this can be proper noun taken as common noun since it is used all the time.

What is the real rule behind this? Thank you very much.

Joe Carillo

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Re: Should "Styrofoam" have a capital "S"?
« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2011, 04:37:43 PM »
Your editor is right in saying that “Styrofoam” is a patented name. It’s a 60-year-old trademark of The Dow Chemical Company for a light, resilient extruded polystyrene foam insulation, and as such should be treated as a proper name with the first letter in upper case. However, that name is now commonly used in the generic sense, with the first letter in lower case, for disposable foam products such as coffee cups, coolers and packaging materials—a generic usage that Dow objects to on the ground that these materials are not made of Styrofoam but from expanded polystyrene (EPS), which doesn’t have the insulation value, compressive strength, or moisture-resistant properties of the Dow product.

So the question is: Should the word “Styrofoam” always be treated as proper noun with the first letter in upper case? Three dictionaries I consulted, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the Oxford Dictionary, and Collins English Dictionary, acknowledge the generic, lower-case form as common usage in print. The Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, on the other hand, recognizes only the proper noun form with upper-case first letter. That’s three against one, so I think it would be going against the grain of current usage to scrupulously treat that word as a proper name all the time. When using it as a modifier, for instance, it would look too commercial to write “We used Styrofoam picnic boxes”; it would be much more natural and unobtrusive to write that as “We used styrofoam picnic boxes,” particularly if you aren’t sure of the provenance of those boxes. (I must warn you, though, that if you use Microsoft Spellcheck, it would insist on “Styrofoam” as a proper noun. I would routinely countermand that prescription if I were you.)

roton11

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Re: Should "Styrofoam" have a capital "S"?
« Reply #2 on: June 02, 2012, 07:18:01 PM »
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that college loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, unlike nearly every other type of debt. In fact, such loans can be discharged in rare cases, when borrowers are able to show that repaying would cause undue hardship.