Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
“Lego, not Legos.” Those three words define the vernacular of the Lego world, both inside and out. It’s one of those “fun facts” that are repeated ad nauseum, like how “Tame Impala is actually just one person” and that “Mortensen actually broke his toe there” after that one scene in Lord of the Rings. These little-bitty rectifications have become commonplace in normal peoples’ lives, with those rectifiers in question seemingly contractually-obligated to rain hell on some poor, ignorant Ringer who may have slipped up on their IMDB trivia knowledge. However, and I may be biased, it seems like more and more people have embraced their role as a Lego (proponent?), with more and more common folk being chastised for their semantical faults. Whether it be in a local Target or even on a nationwide broadcasting channel with famous character actor Will Arnett, you can’t seem to escape these Lego sentinels. Honestly, I may be tarred and feathered myself for forgetting to fully capitalize the name. Blasphemy, I know. But why are so many people so partial to tacking on that sacrilegious ‘s’ on to the end? Why must the singularity of such a word that identifies billions upon billions of bricks worldwide be so tightly preserved?
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After a quick Google search, it looks like the etymology of the brand’s titular product is that it’s semantically a collective noun, akin to that of “family” or “team.” By definition, they all fall under a whole. A singularity. A sort of collective consciousness. Now a family and a team, they act as a unit, a sort of holistic being with a common identity and purpose. The parts of the whole are often defined by the group itself, with family surnames and team handles being the first thing most associated with an individual that’s a part of it. The whole of a team and a family is something that goes beyond its parts. A team can trade its players, but it’ll always stay the Lakers or the Celtics. A family can lose a grandparent and gain a newborn, but it’ll always stay the Wilsons. Of course, there’s a flood of discourse that can come from a claim like that, because now that I think about it it seems like I just derived it from the “Ship of Theseus” debate. Despite the glaring paradoxes of meronomy, it’s hard to ignore the basic truth of families and teams: that its nature and denomination is something that very often surpasses its parts, existing as more of an entity of itself rather than an embodiment of its unique pieces. But how does the almighty Lego fit into this? Does it follow the aforementioned trend of collective ontology?
No, I don’t think so.
I forgot to mention that I have been an avid collector of Lego for all 18 years of my life, and as sit in my room surrounded by my builds that have defined each and every era of my life, I simply cannot accept the fact that “Lego” is simply another type of “family” or “team” in the dictionary of the world. (other stuff) As much as I hate to break the community’s status quo, I have to embrace my own truth that it is, in fact, “Legos.”