If I’m asking for paper, I tend to ask, “do you have any paper.” Not “do you have a pad of paper” or, surprisingly enough, “do you have any pads.”

Who in the world is going to expect that, and why? Even if both speakers are women of menstruating age (not very likely overall), it’s much more common to ask for a pad of paper to write something on, or for something to pad something with. Women who use maxipads carry their own and would not ask except in emergency (and that could not happen more than one week in the month at most).

I can understand that, but what I contend that your writing, divorced from authorial intent, is doing so. For example, in “I’ve been able to identify three key reasons why I think it’s happening,” “I think” indicates your subjectivity, but the vague “it’s happening” puts the universality back in. It implies a whole host of people making maxipad-related jokes. So I’m experiencing a disconnect between your original post and the subsequent conversation. Hooray internet.

Also, part of my bugaboo here is . I think that you’ve implicated linguistics in a way that demands evidence, and which settle into an uncomfortably pseudo-factish realm. Maybe it’s because I know so many people trying to analyze language, usage, and phonetics with some degree of objectivity that your statements read to me as unfounded theories than as statements of opinion.

Now that I’ve brought up linguification, I’m all het up. Last time I stipulated our different experiences along gender lines. But now I want to see what’s in a corpus and investigate the usage of “pad.” Because one thing I’ve learned is that a person’s (any person’s) estimates of language based solely on memory are generally wrong. I’d love to have access to a corpus where the spoken texts are more informal (these groups are pulled from unscripted televison programs, which seems to show a bias toward news programs), but I don’t, because this is the only free English corpus with a web interface I can use from work. I’ll search for “pad.[n*]” to get “pad” as a standalone word, used as a noun. I’ll try looking up “fiction,” since I suspect “spoken” will be less representative in this case. Then I’ll use the random sample button to pull up 100 uses, because I don’t have time to look at all 1936. In those 100, I see lots of stationery, a few apartments, a number of places for vehicles to begin and end flight (a sense I’d forgotten about), and only one reference that is ambiguous enough that it might refer to a maxipad. Another similar search on “spoken” (only about 400) produces no matching senses. The only uses of maxi pad seem to show up in the magazine section, with sources like Cosmopolitan and Ms. Adding “a”, 0, 0 to the context line, gives a search for “a pad”, which is less (404), but still no appearances of maxi pad.

Yes, I know there’s bias in the corpus construction methods and you’re referring to everyday informal face-to-face conversation. I don’t have access to a corpus like that from here. One probably exists. More importantly, you’re referring to your own personal corpus, which you have slightly more access to than I do. But you’ve also got your own cognitive biases. But those are really hard to evaluate. Etc. Still, this is a place and a method to start investigating the claim you’ve made, and the result is far the opposite of what you expect. It’s a bit further off than what I expected as well; and there are far more apartment pads than i would’ve dreamed of.)

What’s also frustrating is that I think I generally understand your point and agree with it–if someone asks you (specifically, and by extension many others) for a pad and you have no pads of any kind, you expect that they are asking you for a maxi pad. But the most relevant sense isn’t necessarily the most frequent sense, even though that’s often how we expect things to work. (From my perspective, the most relevant meaning is still not very relevant, so I underestimated the frequency.) If we were to investigate the specific word frequency of your experience, we might find that pad is used to mean maxipad more often than not, or we might not. But your default understanding is going to remain constant regardless.

It’s not your point, it’s the argument supporting it (or the proposed rationalization for it, or the possible theoretical foundation for it) that’s flawed. And it’s flawed in a way that particularly bugs me, because it adds to the distortion of how we view language and its significance.

“The problem you seem to be running up against is that fact that I used a standard universal to something that applies to a thing that mostly concerns women. Men do this all the time and no one blinks. Women do it about women things and men pull up short and go ‘but wait.’ I’m not saying you’re a rampant sexist or anything for doing so, I’m just observing that I find it interesting and funny that this is the reaction. It’s understandable, but slightly flawed.”

Yea, I noticed this when I was responding before, but just could not figure out how to address it. I do get bugged by things like this in a lot of contexts, but I’m not about to try to argue that I have no expectation bias or that it wasn’t in operation here to start me thinking about it. Still, generalizing in this manner from a gendered difference to a nongendered universal is logically flawed in either direction, and I don’t know what to do about it.

Which people? Evidence?

Dunno when your meaning might turn up as a hit; I got tired of reading at 10 screens.

Why some people think it’s a joke? Because some people want to insult Apple. Because some people want to insult women. Because some people have no real sex life and free associate instead.

Except half the population, ie males.
And females under puberty.
And females past menopause.
And females who use tampons, cups, etc.
And females who use rags, socks, paper towels, etc.

Now that’s down to a lot less than ‘everyone’, who EVER asks for a box of pads. Now subtract those users who say things like ‘sanitary napkins’ or ‘Modess’ or other brand name without a noun.

Also, how many users who might ask for a ‘box of pads’ would ask for ‘a pad’? In a store you ask for a ‘box of’. In a restroom you just put a quarter in the slot. So who exactly is going to ask whom for ‘A pad’? Maybe occasionally — but sure not ‘everyone who asks’.

So how is ‘a box of pads’ going to get confused with ‘an iPad’? Nobody asks for ‘a box of iPads.’ Sanitary napkins come in boxes; ebook readers don’t, unless you’re a big box store.

And now my brain is filled with Graham Chapman saying “Pad? Pad? Dreadful, tinny sort of word. Gooooooooone.”

Need I really, really say: “just for me, personally, and no one has to agree with me, but…”? No.

Also, I don’t have interest in convincing you that my opinion or my analysis is universal, I just think this is the reaon behind the name badness. Am I right or is it something else more sinister or less complex? Don’t know.

Also, in terms of the Most Of The Time thing, I will point out that often in conversation someone will say “most of the time” or “most people” and refer to both men and women. There’s no need to gender this because, when taken as a whole, combining the use of pad amongst both men and women in the past, say, 10 years or so, when that word has been used at all in American life, the likelihood of it being used to mean maxipad far outweighs other uses. That’s because the country is made up of roughly 50% women.

The problem you seem to be running up against is that fact that I used a standard universal to something that applies to a thing that mostly concerns women. Men do this all the time and no one blinks. Women do it about women things and men pull up short and go “but wait.” I’m not saying you’re a rampant sexist or anything for doing so, I’m just observing that I find it interesting and funny that this is the reaction. It’s understandable, but slightly flawed.

I disagree on the whole pod vs. pad thing, though I’m sure it’s subjective to personal tastes. I think pod is a plenty strong word with the short o because a short o doesn’t lay there like a short a does, at least not in my accent. I realize that in other accents this is not the same.

You think pad is a weak word. But your opinion has no connection to the phonetic properties of the word. The way you present it here, it appears as though you’re trying to argue that “pad” is an objectively weak word because of various linguistic properties. But you’ll need more evidence to argue that. You’ll probably also need to give a clearer definition of what defines a “weak” word or what kind of word can “support” an i- prefix. You don’t need to prove to me that you think “pad” is a weak word, but you do have to convince me to accept that as universal to some extent if you’re trying to explain why iPad has become a joke to other people.

I’ll try to rephrase my objection to part 3; I’m going to work through it from scratch for my own benefit. I understand that, taking all American English conversation regardless of the gender of the speaker or the audience, most of the time “pad” refers to Maxipad. However, the actual experience is very different according to gender (or, I guess, according to a person’s relationship to menstruation, which is a highly gendered classification). Women hear and use “pad” without other modifiers very often, and it almost always means “Maxipad.” Men hear and use “pad” without a modifier far less often, but still enough for it to be considered common vocabulary, and it almost never means “Maxipad.”

So evaluating “most of the time when someone asks for a pad they’re asking for a maxipad” from a personal perspective is different based on gender. By extension, then, this only partially explains the iPad jokes; it doesn’t explain why men who have very far less experience with maxipads and menstruation are making the same joke.

Writing this out now, it occurs to me that you’re writing very much in the context of the previous post. But I’ve seen a lot of similar (but not quite similar; see next paragraph) jokes from men, and I don’t think point 3 applies to all of them.

My personal reactions to the iPad jokes that have crossed my path (probably far fewer than you’ve seen), I know that my personal reaction to iPad jokes has been different based on the gender of the speaker. I read the jokes made by women to come from a place of “this is a part of my life that I find amusingly incongruous with Apple’s intent,” while I read most of the jokes made by men to come from a place of, “I hear this also refers to something that women put on their icky lady bits which makes it icky, which is incongruous with Apple’s intent.”

I’m really tired of the darned menstrual product jokes. Sigh. I do feel like there’s a shaming element involved, and it’s irritating.

That said, I don’t really like the product name that much, but I’m also not really impressed by the product. I was hoping it’d have decent graphical input abilities and that they’d work with Adobe a little more–their artist and graphic designer user base is very large, so I was hoping we’d be able to run full versions of Illustrator and Photoshop (and Painter) on it, and use a stylus. But no. So, oh well.

However, I wasn’t that impressed by the iPhone at first, and now I have an iPod Touch and love it to piecs (although EGADS is that name irritating and cumbersome!). So we’ll just have to see how both the name and the product play out, I think.

I don’t think that pad should be taboo or considered dirty. That badness is associated with shaming women for their natural bodily functions, which is not cool. Making pad a less silly-associated word is fine with me.

Still, I think pad is just a weak word in general. If it were a stronger type of word maybe this wouldn’t even be an issue.

Also, just because men don’t often ask for or talk about maxipads doesn’t mean that Most Of The Time cannot be applied here. How often do you use the word pad, just pad, on a regular basis? In combination with other words, sure. But not too many people are referring to the place they live as a pad without it being a one-off joke, no one goes to a Thai food place and asks for just Pad, and see how I mentioned the whole non-specific use thing up there? Some of us don’t game, and therefore do not have pads just lying around the house being talked about.