Webster's Dictionary
Webster's Dictionary is any of the dictionaries edited by Noah Webster in the early nineteenth century, numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster's name. "Webster's" has become a genericized trademark in the U. S. for dictionaries of the English language, is used in English dictionary titles. Merriam-Webster is the corporate heir to Noah Webster's original works, which are in the public domain. Noah Webster, the author of the readers and spelling books which dominated the American market at the time, spent decades of research in compiling his dictionaries, his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, appeared in 1806. In it, he popularized features which would become a hallmark of American English spelling and included technical terms from the arts and sciences rather than confining his dictionary to literary words. Webster was a proponent of English spelling reform for reasons both nationalistic. In A Companion to the American Revolution, John Algeo notes: "it is assumed that characteristically American spellings were invented by Noah Webster.
He was influential in popularizing certain spellings in America, but he did not originate them. Rather he chose existing options such as center and check on such grounds as simplicity, analogy or etymology". In William Shakespeare's first folios, for example, spellings such as center and color are the most common, he spent the next two decades working to expand his dictionary. In 1828, at the age of 70, Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language in two quarto volumes containing 70,000 entries, as against the 58,000 of any previous dictionary. There were 2,500 copies printed, at $20 for the two volumes. At first the set sold poorly; when he lowered the price to $15, its sales improved, by 1836 that edition was exhausted. Not all copies were bound at the same time. In 1841, 82-year-old Noah Webster published a second edition of his lexicographical masterpiece with the help of his son, William G. Webster, its title page does not claim the status of second edition noting that this new edition was the "first edition in octavo" in contrast to the quarto format of the first edition of 1828.
Again in two volumes, the title page proclaimed that the Dictionary contained "the whole vocabulary of the quarto, with corrections and several thousand additional words: to, prefixed an introductory dissertation on the origin and connection of the languages of western Asia and Europe, with an explanation of the principles on which languages are formed. B. L. Hamlen of New Haven, prepared the 1841 printing of the second edition; when Webster died, his heirs sold unbound sheets of his 1841 revision American Dictionary of the English Language to the firm of J. S. & C. Adams of Amherst, Massachusetts; this firm bound and published a small number of copies in 1844 – the same edition that Emily Dickinson used as a tool for her poetic composition. However, a $15 price tag on the book made it too expensive to sell so the Amherst firm decided to sell out. Merriam acquired rights from Adams, as well as signing a contract with Webster’s heirs for sole rights; the third printing of the second edition was by George and Charles Merriam of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1845.
This was the first Webster's Dictionary with a Merriam imprint. Lepore demonstrates Webster's innovative ideas about language and politics and shows why Webster's endeavours were at first so poorly received. Culturally conservative Federalists denounced the work as radical—too inclusive in its lexicon and bordering on vulgar. Meanwhile, Webster's old foes, the Jeffersonian Republicans, attacked the man, labelling him mad for such an undertaking. Scholars have long seen Webster's 1844 dictionary to be an important resource for reading poet Emily Dickinson's life and work. One biographer said, "The dictionary was no mere reference book to her, he shows the ways in which American poetry has inherited Webster and drawn upon his lexicography in order to reinvent it. Austin explicates key definitions from both the Compendious and American dictionaries and brings into its discourse a range of concerns including the politics of American English, the question of national identity and culture in the early moments of American independence, the poetics of citation and of definition.
Webster's dictionaries were a redefinition of Americanism within the context of an emergent and unstable American socio-political and cultural identity. Webster's identification of his project as a "federal language" shows his competing impulses towards regularity and innovation in historical terms; the contradictions of Webster's project represented a part of a larger dialectical play between liberty and order within Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary political debates. Noah Webster's assistant, chief competitor, Joseph Emerson Worcester, Webster's son-in-law Chauncey A. Goodrich, published an abridgment of Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language in 1829, with the same number of words and Webster's full definitions, but with truncated literary references and expanded etymology. Although it was more successful f
Marketing
Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. Marketing is the business process of satisfying customers. With its focus on the customer, marketing is one of the premier components of business management. Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as "the activity, set of institutions, processes for creating, communicating and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients and society at large." The term developed from the original meaning which referred to going to market with goods for sale. From a sales process engineering perspective, marketing is "a set of processes that are interconnected and interdependent with other functions" of a business aimed at achieving customer interest and satisfaction. Philip Kotler defines marketing as Satisfying wants through an exchange process; the Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as "the management process responsible for identifying and satisfying customer requirements profitably." A similar concept is the value-based marketing which states the role of marketing to contribute to increasing shareholder value.
In this context, marketing can be defined as "the management process that seeks to maximise returns to shareholders by developing relationships with valued customers and creating a competitive advantage."Marketing practice tended to be seen as a creative industry in the past, which included advertising and selling. However, because the academic study of marketing makes extensive use of social sciences, sociology, economics and neuroscience, the profession is now recognized as a science, allowing numerous universities to offer Master-of-Science programs; the process of marketing is that of bringing a product to market, which includes these steps: broad market research. Many parts of the marketing process involve use of the creative arts. The'marketing concept' proposes that in order to satisfy the organizational objectives, an organization should anticipate the needs and wants of potential consumers and satisfy them more than its competitors; this concept originated from Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations, but would not become used until nearly 200 years later.
Marketing and Marketing Concepts are directly related. Given the centrality of customer needs and wants in marketing, a rich understanding of these concepts is essential: Needs: Something necessary for people to live a healthy and safe life; when needs remain unfulfilled, there is a clear adverse outcome: death. Needs can be objective and physical, such as the need for food and shelter. Wants: Something, desired, wished for or aspired to. Wants are not essential for basic survival and are shaped by culture or peer-groups. Demands: When needs and wants are backed by the ability to pay, they have the potential to become economic demands. Marketing research, conducted for the purpose of new product development or product improvement, is concerned with identifying the consumer's unmet needs. Customer needs are central to market segmentation, concerned with dividing markets into distinct groups of buyers on the basis of "distinct needs, characteristics, or behaviors who might require separate products or marketing mixes."
Needs-based segmentation "places the customers' desires at the forefront of how a company designs and markets products or services." Although needs-based segmentation is difficult to do in practice, it has been proved to be one of the most effective ways to segment a market. In addition, a great deal of advertising and promotion is designed to show how a given product's benefits meet the customer's needs, wants or expectations in a unique way. A marketing orientation has been defined as a "philosophy of business management." Or "a corporate state of mind" or as an "organisation culture" Although scholars continue to debate the precise nature of specific orientations that inform marketing practice, the most cited orientations are as follows: A firm employing a product orientation is concerned with the quality of its own product. A product orientation is based on the assumption that, all things being equal, consumers will purchase products of a superior quality; the approach is most effective when the firm has deep insights into customers and their needs and desires derived from research and intuition and understands consumers' quality expectations and price they are willing to pay.
For example, Sony Walkman and Apple iPod were innovative product designs that addressed consumers' unmet needs. Although the product orientation has been supplanted by the marketing orientation, firms practicing a product orientation can still be found in haute couture and in arts marketing. A firm using a sales orientation focuses on the selling/promotion of the firm's existing products, rather than determining new or unmet consumer needs or desires; this entails selling existing products, using promotion and direct sales techniques to attain the highest sales possible. The sales orientation "is practiced with unsought goods." One study found that industrial companies are more to hold a sales orientation than consumer goods companies. The approach may suit scenarios in wh
Film
A film called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, or photoplay, is a series of still images that, when shown on a screen, create the illusion of moving images. This optical illusion causes the audience to perceive continuous motion between separate objects viewed in rapid succession; the process of filmmaking is both an industry. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, other visual effects; the word "cinema", short for cinematography, is used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, to the art of filmmaking itself. The contemporary definition of cinema is the art of simulating experiences to communicate ideas, perceptions, beauty or atmosphere by the means of recorded or programmed moving images along with other sensory stimulations. Films were recorded onto plastic film through a photochemical process and shown through a movie projector onto a large screen.
Contemporary films are now fully digital through the entire process of production and exhibition, while films recorded in a photochemical form traditionally included an analogous optical soundtrack. Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, they reflect those cultures. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment, a powerful medium for educating—or indoctrinating—citizens; the visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions through the use of dubbing or subtitles to translate the dialog into other languages; the individual images that make up a film are called frames. In the projection of traditional celluloid films, a rotating shutter causes intervals of darkness as each frame, in turn, is moved into position to be projected, but the viewer does not notice the interruptions because of an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after its source disappears.
The perception of motion is due to a psychological effect called the phi phenomenon. The name "film" originates from the fact that photographic film has been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture and flick; the most common term in the United States is movie. Common terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies, cinema. In early years, the word sheet was sometimes used instead of screen. Preceding film in origin by thousands of years, early plays and dances had elements common to film: scripts, costumes, direction, audiences and scores. Much terminology used in film theory and criticism apply, such as mise en scène. Owing to the lack of any technology for doing so, the moving images and sounds could not be recorded for replaying as with film; the magic lantern created by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s, could be used to project animation, achieved by various types of mechanical slides.
Two glass slides, one with the stationary part of the picture and the other with the part, to move, would be placed one on top of the other and projected together the moving slide would be hand-operated, either directly or by means of a lever or other mechanism. Chromotrope slides, which produced eye-dazzling displays of continuously cycling abstract geometrical patterns and colors, were operated by means of a small crank and pulley wheel that rotated a glass disc. In the mid-19th century, inventions such as Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope and the zoetrope demonstrated that a designed sequence of drawings, showing phases of the changing appearance of objects in motion, would appear to show the objects moving if they were displayed one after the other at a sufficiently rapid rate; these devices relied on the phenomenon of persistence of vision to make the display appear continuous though the observer's view was blocked as each drawing rotated into the location where its predecessor had just been glimpsed.
Each sequence was limited to a small number of drawings twelve, so it could only show endlessly repeating cyclical motions. By the late 1880s, the last major device of this type, the praxinoscope, had been elaborated into a form that employed a long coiled band containing hundreds of images painted on glass and used the elements of a magic lantern to project them onto a screen; the use of sequences of photographs in such devices was limited to a few experiments with subjects photographed in a series of poses because the available emulsions were not sensitive enough to allow the short exposures needed to photograph subjects that were moving. The sensitivity was improved and in the late 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge created the first animated image sequences photographed in real-time. A row of cameras was used, each, in turn, capturing one image on a photographic glass plate, so the total number of images in each sequence was limited by the number of cameras, about two dozen at most. Muybridge used his system to analyze the movements of a wi
Desire
Desire is a sense of longing or hoping for a person, object, or outcome. The same sense is expressed by emotions such as "craving"; when a person desires something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the enjoyment or the thought of the item or person, they want to take actions to obtain their goal. The motivational aspect of desire has long been noted by philosophers. While desires are classified as emotions by laypersons, psychologists describe desires as different from emotions. Marketing and advertising companies have used psychological research on how desire is stimulated to find more effective ways to induce consumers into buying a given product or service. While some advertising attempts to give buyers a sense of lack or wanting, other types of advertising create desire associating the product with desirable attributes, by showing either a celebrity or a model with the product; the theme of desire is at the core of romance novels, which create drama by showing cases where human desire is impeded by social conventions, class, or cultural barriers.
The theme of desire is used in other literary genres, such as Gothic novels. Poets ranging from Homer to Toni Morrison have dealt with the theme of desire in their work. Just as desire is central to the written fiction genre of romance, it is the central theme of melodrama films, which use plots that appeal to the heightened emotions of the audience by showing "crises of human emotion, failed romance or friendship", in which desire is thwarted or unrequited. In philosophy, desire has been identified as a philosophical problem since Antiquity. In The Republic, Plato argues that individual desires must be postponed in the name of the higher ideal. In De Anima, Aristotle claims that desire is implicated in animal interactions and the propensity of animals to motion. Hobbes proposed the concept of psychological hedonism, which asserts that the "fundamental motivation of all human action is the desire for pleasure." Baruch Spinoza had a view which contrasted with Hobbes, in that "he saw natural desires as a form of bondage" that are not chosen by a person of their own free will.
David Hume claimed that desires and passions are non-cognitive, automatic bodily responses, he argued that reasoning is "capable only of devising means to ends set by desire". Immanuel Kant called any action based on desires a hypothetical imperative, meaning by this that it is a command of reason that applies only if one desires the goal in question. Kant established a relation between the beautiful and pleasure in Critique of Judgment. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel claimed that "self-consciousness is desire"; because desire can cause humans to become obsessed and embittered, it has been called one of the causes of woe for mankind. Within the teachings of Buddhism, craving is thought to be the cause of all suffering that one experiences in human existence; the eradication of craving leads one to Nirvana. However, desire for wholesome things is seen as liberating and enhancing. While the stream of desire for sense-pleasures must be cut a practitioner on the path to liberation is encouraged by the Buddha to "generate desire" for the fostering of skillful qualities and the abandoning of unskillful ones.
In Hinduism, the Rig Veda's creation myth Nasadiya Sukta states regarding the one spirit: "In the beginning there was Desire, first seed of mind. Poets found the bond of being in non-being in their heart's thought". In Buddhism, for an individual to effect his or her liberation, the flow of sense-desire must be cut completely. According to the early Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha stated that monks should "generate desire" for the sake of fostering skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones. There is a double message here between what Buddha said, that desire must be created, what some monks propose to their followers, that desire must be cut. Truth is Buddhism entails two aspects: the ideas monks taught to civilize peasantry, on the one hand, the esoteric teachings of tantra for self-realization, on the other, where—just as Buddha said—desire must be generated. Dr. Oscar R. Gómez holds that teachings imparted by H. H. 14th Dalai Lama are meant for leaders to be able to choose a specific desire consciously by creating it from the inside.
People have a tendency to live based on desires coming from the outside, such desires are the ones making choices for them. As an alternative, tantric Tibetan Buddhism allows to choose a desire consciously. Within Christianity, desire is seen as something that can either lead a person towards God and destiny or away from him. Desire is not considered to be a bad thing of itself. While desires are classified as emotions by laypersons, psychologists describe desires as different from emotions. For psychologists, desires arise from bodily functions. On the other hand, emotions arise from a person's ment
Goods
In economics, goods are materials that satisfy human wants and provide utility, for example, to a consumer making a purchase of a satisfying product. A common distinction is made between goods that are tangible property, services, which are non-physical. A good may be a consumable item, useful to people but scarce in relation to its demand, so that human effort is required to obtain it. In contrast, free goods, such as air, are in abundant supply and need no conscious effort to obtain them. Personal goods are things such as televisions, living room furniture, cellular telephones anything owned or used on a daily basis, not food related. Commercial goods are construed as any tangible product, manufactured and made available for supply to be used in an industry of commerce. Commercial goods could be tractors, commercial vehicles, mobile structures and roofing materials. Commercial and personal goods as categories are broad and cover everything a person sees from the time they wake up in their home, on their commute to work to their arrival at the workplace.
Commodities may be used as a synonym for economic goods but refer to marketable raw materials and primary products. Although in economic theory all goods are considered tangible, in reality certain classes of goods, such as information, only take intangible forms. For example, among other goods an apple is a tangible object, while news belongs to an intangible class of goods and can be perceived only by means of an instrument such as print or television. Goods may increase or decrease their utility directly or indirectly and may be described as having marginal utility; some things are useful, but not scarce enough to have monetary value, such as the Earth's atmosphere, these are referred to as'free goods'. In normal parlance, "goods" is always a plural word, but economists have long termed a single item of goods "a good". Ugly though this may sound, an alternative is hard to find. In economics, a bad is the opposite of a good. Whether an object is a good or a bad depends on each individual consumer and therefore, it is important to realize that not all goods are good all the time and not all goods are goods to all people.
Goods' diversity allows for their classification into different categories based on distinctive characteristics, such as tangibility and relative elasticity. A tangible good like an apple differs from an intangible good like information due to the impossibility of a person to physically hold the latter, whereas the former occupies physical space. Intangible goods differ from services in that final goods are transferable and can be traded, whereas a service cannot. Price elasticity differentiates types of goods. An elastic good is one for which there is a large change in quantity due to a small change in price, therefore is to be part of a family of substitute goods. An inelastic good is one for which there are few or no substitutes, such as tickets to major sporting events, original works by famous artists, prescription medicine such as insulin. Complementary goods are more inelastic than goods in a family of substitutes. For example, if a rise in the price of beef results in a decrease in the quantity of beef demanded, it is that the quantity of hamburger buns demanded will drop, despite no change in buns' prices.
This is. It is important to note that goods considered complements or substitutes are relative associations and should not be understood in a vacuum; the degree to which a good is a substitute or a complement depends on its relationship to other goods, rather than an intrinsic characteristic, can be measured as cross elasticity of demand by employing statistical techniques such as covariance and correlation. The following chart illustrates the classification of goods according to their exclusivity and competitiveness. Goods are capable of being physically delivered to a consumer. Goods that are economic intangibles can only be stored and consumed by means of media. Goods, both tangibles and intangibles, may involve the transfer of product ownership to the consumer. Services do not involve transfer of ownership of the service itself, but may involve transfer of ownership of goods developed or marketed by a service provider in the course of the service. For example, sale of storage related goods, which could consist of storage sheds, storage containers, storage buildings as tangibles or storage supplies such as boxes, bubble wrap, tape and the like which are consumables, or distributing electricity among consumers is a service provided by an electric utility company.
This service can only be experienced through the consumption of electrical energy, available in a variety of voltages and, in this case, is the economic goods produced by the electric utility company. While the service is a process that remains in its entirety in the ownership of the electric service provider, the goods is the object of ownership transfer; the consumer becomes electric energy owner by purchase and may use it for any lawful purposes just like any other goods. Fast-moving consumer goods Final goods Intangible asset Intangible good List of economics topics Goods and services Service Tangible property Bannock, Graham et al.. Dictionary of Economics, Penguin Books. Milgate, Murray, "goods and commodities," The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 2, pp. 546–48. Includes historical and contemporary uses of the terms in economics. Media related to Good
Screaming
A scream, yell, hoot, vociferation, bellow, or raising one's voice, is a loud vocalization in which air is passed through the vocal folds with greater force than is used in regular or close-distance vocalisation. This can be performed by any creature possessing lungs, including humans. There are slight differences in meaning among them. A scream is an instinctive or reflex action, with a strong emotional aspect, like fear, surprise, excitement, etc. A large number of words exist to describe the act of making loud vocalizations, whether intentionally or in response to stimuli, with specific nuances. For example, an early twentieth century synonym guide places variations under the heading of "call", includes as synonyms, bellow, cry, exclaim, scream, shriek and yell, each with its own implications; this source states: To call is to send out the voice in order to attract another's attention, either by word or by inarticulate utterance. Animals call their young; the sense is extended to include summons by any signal.
To shout is to call or exclaim with the fullest volume of sustained voice. We shout words. To bawl is to utter senseless, noisy cries, as of a child in pain or anger. Bellow and roar are applied to the utterances of animals, only contemptuously to those of persons. To clamor is to utter with noisy iteration. To vociferate is applied to loud and excited speech where there is little besides the exertion of voice. In exclaiming, the utterance may not be strikingly, though somewhat, above the ordinary tone and pitch. To ejaculate is to throw out brief, but coherent utterances of joy, of appeal, prayer. To cry out is to give forth a louder and more excited utterance than in exclaiming or calling. In the most common colloquial usage, to cry is to express grief or pain by weeping or sobbing. One may cry out, or ejaculate with no thought of others' presence. Another source proposes different implications for some of these terms, stating that "the call is addressed to a specific person... and the shout projected to a distant but identifiable target, the holler is emitted to whomever may be within earshot".
Whooping is another name given to the same kind of noise making as hollering. This source separately notes that a shout "may be joyous. In psychology the scream is an important theme in the theories of Arthur Janov. In his book The Primal Scream, Janov claims that the cure for neurosis is to confront the patient with his suppressed pain resulting from an experienced trauma; this confrontation gives birth to a scream. Janov believes; the scream is only a form of expression of primal pain, which comes from one's childhood, the reliving of this pain and its expression. This appears through the scream and can cure the patient from his neurosis. Janov describes the primal scream as distinctive and unmistakable, it is a “strangely low and involuntary sound. Some people are moaning and are coiling themselves up. One screams as result of all the other times when it had to stay still, was making fun of, was humiliated or was beaten up”. Janov says that the primal scream has series of reactions; the scream seems to be a liberating experience”.
Janov noticed this with all his patients. Women who seem to have baby-voices during the therapy are developing with their primal scream a low voice. Gregory Whitehead, founder of the Institute for Screamscape Studies, believes that the voice is used to focus the power: “scream used to be a psychological weapon both for you and against your opponent, it raises confidence to the person using it. Creating power with yell is having to affect someone without touching them”. In this case screaming is a protective weapon, as often used by animals, who scream as an expression of power or during fights with another animals. Screaming and yelling are a means of expressing pleasure. Studies on monkeys have shown that when female monkeys scream during sex, it helps the male ejaculate. An approximation of 86 percent of the times, where female monkeys screamed during sexual encounter, brought a 59 percent of success rate, in comparison to the 2 percent, without the female-scream. Gayle Brewer of the University of Central Lancashire and Colin Hendrie of the University of Leeds made a similar research with women, that shows that women do scream during intercourse as an encouragement for their partner to do "a better job".
Gregory Whitehead defines the giving birth scream as a yes scream, because it expresses an opening into the world for a new human who begins life by screaming
Brand
A brand is an overall experience of a customer that distinguishes an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of the customer. Brands are used in business and advertising. Name brands are sometimes distinguished from generic or store brands; the practice of branding is thought to have begun with the ancient Egyptians, who were known to have engaged in livestock branding as early as 2,700 BCE. Branding was used to differentiate one person’s cattle from another's by means of a distinctive symbol burned into the animal’s skin with a hot branding iron. If a person stole any of the cattle, anyone else who saw the symbol could deduce the actual owner. However, the term has been extended to mean a strategic personality for a product or company, so that ‘brand’ now suggests the values and promises that a consumer may perceive and buy into. Over time, the practice of branding objects extended to a broader range of packaging and goods offered for sale including oil, wine and fish sauce. Branding in terms of painting a cow with symbols or colors at flea markets was considered to be one of the oldest forms of the practice.
Branding is a set of marketing and communication methods that help to distinguish a company or products from competitors, aiming to create a lasting impression in the minds of customers. The key components that form a brand's toolbox include a brand’s identity, brand communication, brand awareness, brand loyalty, various branding strategies. Many companies believe that there is little to differentiate between several types of products in the 21st century, therefore branding is one of a few remaining forms of product differentiation. Brand equity is the measurable totality of a brand's worth and is validated by assessing the effectiveness of these branding components; as markets become dynamic and fluctuating, brand equity is a marketing technique to increase customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, with side effects like reduced price sensitivity. A brand is, in essence, a promise to its customers of what they can expect from products and may include emotional as well as functional benefits.
When a customer is familiar with a brand, or favours it incomparably to its competitors, this is when a corporation has reached a high level of brand equity. Special accounting standards have been devised to assess brand equity. In accounting, a brand defined as an intangible asset, is the most valuable asset on a corporation’s balance sheet. Brand owners manage their brands to create shareholder value, brand valuation is an important management technique that ascribes a monetary value to a brand, allows marketing investment to be managed to maximize shareholder value. Although only acquired brands appear on a company's balance sheet, the notion of putting a value on a brand forces marketing leaders to be focused on long term stewardship of the brand and managing for value; the word ‘brand’ is used as a metonym referring to the company, identified with a brand. Marque or make are used to denote a brand of motor vehicle, which may be distinguished from a car model. A concept brand is a brand, associated with an abstract concept, like breast cancer awareness or environmentalism, rather than a specific product, service, or business.
A commodity brand is a brand associated with a commodity. The word, derives from its original and current meaning as a firebrand, a burning piece of wood; that word comes from the Old High German and Old English byrnan and brinnan via Middle English as birnan and brond. Torches were used to indelibly mark items such as furniture and pottery, to permanently burn identifying marks into the skin of slaves and livestock; the firebrands were replaced with branding irons. The marks themselves took on the term and came to be associated with craftsmen's products. Through that association, the term acquired its current meaning. Branding and labelling have an ancient history. Branding began with the practice of branding livestock in order to deter theft. Images of the branding of cattle occur in ancient Egyptian tombs dating to around 2,700 BCE. Over time, purchasers realised that the brand provided information about origin as well as about ownership, could serve as a guide to quality. Branding was adapted by farmers and traders for use on other types of goods such as pottery and ceramics.
Forms of branding or proto-branding emerged spontaneously and independently throughout Africa and Europe at different times, depending on local conditions. Seals, which acted as quasi-brands, have been found on early Chinese products of the Qin Dynasty. Identity marks, such as stamps on ceramics, were used in ancient Egypt. Diana Twede has argued that the "consumer packaging functions of protection and communication have been necessary whenever packages were the object of transactions", she has shown that amphorae used in Mediterranean trade between 1,500 and 500 BCE exhibited a wide variety of shapes and markings, which consumers used to glean information about the type of goods and the quality. Systematic use of stamped labels dates from around the fourth century BCE. In a pre-literate society, the shape of the amphora and its pictorial markings conveyed information about the contents, region of o
_%2B_slogan_(1994).svg){kind=logo}
Quotations related to Advertising slogan at Wikiquote
