Today we have an odd one: a case of a made-up word taking the place of the word it’s meant to imitate. I can’t think of another example of a trademark taking the place of its homophone in popular usage.
Segue: to make a transition from one thing to another smoothly and without interruption.
Segway™: a two-wheeled electrically-powered motorized personal vehicle.
Segue came into common usage as a music term, a notation indicating that the musicians were to move from one composition to another without taking a break. Like most common music terms, it dates from the mid-1800s and comes from Italian. It means “there follows”; it’s the third person singular present indicative tense of seguire, from the Latin sequi, “to follow.”
Segway™ is an invented word, the registered trademark for Dean Kamen’s one-person vehicle. He invented both the scooter and the name, releasing both into the world in 2001. He chose the name because it combines the idea of a smooth transition (“segue”) with the idea of a path or road to a destination (“way”); put the two together and you get Segway, a trademarkable word that sounds just like its antecedent.
If you say you’re going to segway to a new topic, you’re saying you’re going to use an electric scooter to get to the next slide in your PowerPoint presentation.
This is Word Nerd #58; you can find all the Word Nerd installments in the Word Nerd Index.
Jim MacQuarrie
When he's not arming children for the zombie apocalypse or coaching the USC Trojan Archery team, Jim is writing about "all the stuff that would have gotten you a wedgie in 1976" at AtomicJunkShop.com and serving as the President of CAPS, the Comic Art Professional Society. His kids are all grown up, and his wife is patiently waiting for him to do likewise.
