Bubbling Under

dysoning up the pine needles?

No matter how many revolutionary vacuum cleaners he sells, James Dyson's wish, as stated in his autobiography, is "That one day, Dyson will replace 'Hoover' and become a noun, a verb...long after I am forgotten". It apparently only took his more established rival, the Hoover, a matter of months between being patented as a product and becoming a verb, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: the Hoover cleaner (named after the US industrialist William Henry Hoover) was patented in 1927 and a publication of the same year, the Army & Navy Stores Catalogue, carried an advert claiming 'a Hoovered room..is..free from dust'.

The noun Hoover, although a trade mark, is now often used to refer to any vacuum cleaner. What's more, it has also turned into a verb which has gained new senses: it also means 'to gobble something up', as in she hoovered up a tray of Margarita cocktails.

While it's not at all clear whether Dyson as a noun will ever be used generically as Hoover is, there's a smidgen of good news for Mr Dyson on the verb front: our databases reveal that dysoning was used in the Independent newspaper as far back as January 1996, when a headline speculated 'A material question: will you be dysoning up the pine needles?'. Since then, however, you could hardly say that it's taken off: a Google search brings up around 200 hits for dysoning or dysoned, but that's a tiny number compared to hoovering and hoovered (over 50,000 hits). All in all, and given the word's relative difficulty to pronounce, I predict we'll be hoovering up those cocktails for a few years to come.

get some therapy!

If offered vinotherapy or chocotherapy, you might well think you'd soon be quaffing wine or hoovering up choccies. However, both terms refer to new beauty treatments and refer to having these substances applied to the body: certainly more messy and perhaps less enjoyable than taking them internally. Vinotherapy (also called wine therapy) involves being massaged or covered with grape seeds (or their oil), skins, and stalks: these being rich in antioxidants, they're said to have a beneficial effect on the skin. Similarly, if undergoing chocotherapy, you'd be massaged with cocoa and cocoa butter to benefit from their antioxidant properties.

Other therapies, both for the body and the mind, that we've noticed recently include:

• algotherapy: being wrapped in a warm seaweed paste
• fangotherapy: once you know that fango is Italian for 'mud', you can probably work this one out
• hippotherapy: using horse riding to treat psychological and physical problems [from Greek hippos 'horse']
• mesotherapy: injecting chemicals to break down fatty deposits under the skin [from mesoderm, the parts of the body (e.g. bone, fat, the muscles) derived from the middle layer of cells or tissues of an embryo, from Greek mesos 'middle' and derma 'skin'.]
• phytotherapy: using plants and plant-derived products in massage; also used to refer to herbal medicine [from Greek phuton 'a plant']

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