Brand Names in Military English: The Link between Two Worlds

Following a terminological introduction on the much-debated issue of brand names, this article provides a qualitative overview of the use of both non-genericized and genericized brand names in military English. The scope of this study spans from brand names of military hardware – limited to small arms operated in World War I and World War II – to everyday brand names employed in specialized military coding systems, included in the NATO-approved glossary of brevity words, namely the Joint Brevity Words Publication (JBWP). By means of selected examples, the aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, it is an attempt to establish a link between the world of war, mostly the armed forces, and the linguistically complex world of brand names; on the other hand, it tries to identify common trends in the use of brand names in military terminology and detect the word formation processes, both lexico-semantic and morpho-syntactic, that lead to their coinage.