[mbubb]

came here looking for this comment as its one of those minor peeves - duck tape is from WWII era and is a water resistant cotton tape - modern home depot duct tape is a plasticky, sticky all, purpose fastening tape (not so good for sealing ducts, btw).

There is something called gaffer's tape which I feel like might be more similar to the original duck tape.

Fascinating how words drift over time

https://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/redeye-is-it-duck-or-d...

[jasonhansel]

To be really technical about it: there's a reasonably popular brand of tape called "Duck" (https://www.duckbrand.com/). They refer to their main product, which is a kind of duct tape, as "Duck Tape." To clarify that the term "Duck Tape" refers only to their company's product, they refer to it as "Duck Tape® Brand Duct Tape."

So the phrase "Duck tape" is fine, if you capitalize the first word and use it to refer to tape made by the Duck brand. Likewise, "Duck Tape" is fine, if you capitalize both words, since it is the name of the specific product line made by Duck.

In fact, if you call store-brand adhesive bandages "Band-Aids," and you call store-brand acetaminophen "Tylenol," you could argue that it makes sense to call store-brand duct tape "Duck Tape." And if you don't always capitalize "Band-Aids," you could argue that it makes sense not to capitalize "Duck Tape" either.

So I would argue that using the phrase "duck tape" to refer to duct tape is fine, provided you accept that it is effectively a genericized trademark.

[zarzavat]

Fascinatingly this folk etymology is incorrect. According to Wikipedia[0], the “duck” refers to cotton duck[1], a strong fabric that can be made waterproof, from which the original duck tape was made.

“Duct tape” (with a T) is in fact the retronym and was coined when duck tape started to be used for ducting.

All of this doesn’t explain how Duck-brand tape managed to get a trademark on an existing generic term.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_duck

[computator]

> store-brand adhesive bandages "Band-Aids"

On a tangent to the topic of adhesive bandages, as a bit of a connoisseur of tapes myself, I want to mention that the best band aids I've ever found are Nexcare Waterproof Bandages[1]. Even if you don't care about waterproofing, they stay in place massively better than any other type of band aid I've tried. Years ago, Consumer Reports rated them as the very best as well. Most other adhesive bandages, especially cheap ones, are ridiculously awful, coming undone within minutes.

[1] https://www.nexcare.com/3M/en_US/nexcare/products/catalog/~/...