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Last week I learned a new word, genericide,
when
I read about some letters that Google attorneys have been
sending to the media.
The Internet search company is trying to protect its
trademark and keep it from becoming a generic term for
Internet searching. So the company advises that this is an
appropriate use: I ran a Google search to check out that
guy from the party.
And this is inappropriate: I
googled that hottie.
Over the years, American courts have held that companies have to make this effort, lest their proprietary proper noun become a public-domain common noun.
The companies can be quite zealous, which is
understandable given the millions of dollars that are spent
on building brand identity.
When I edited the local
daily 25 years ago, which was then a very small newspaper
whose circulation area was quite limited, I was astonished
to get a letter from the attorneys for the Binney &
Smith Co.
A local columnist had described a recent sunset as
offering more colors than you could find in a crayola
box.
Somehow that reached the corporate world, and the
lawyers advised that Crayola was a brand name, not another
word for crayon,
and would I in the future please
revise such expressions to crayon box
or Crayola
crayon box.
No problem there. But sometimes it's more difficult. For
example, Dumpster is a trademarked brand name of Dempster
Brothers, Inc., which invented the Dempster
Dumpster.
But there's no other convenient term for
box-shaped trash receptacle that can be tipped and
emptied with hydraulic-powered prongs on the garbage
truck.
And so there's no other way to express something
like Aspiring free-lance writers should learn
dumpster-diving.
Some inventors try to get around that by inventing a
generic term to go with their trademarked term. Chester
Carlson invented the Xerox machine in 1937. He also coined
a generic word for the process: xerography
from the
Greek word xeros,
which means dry, and graph,
which derives from the Greek for to write.
It was
dry writing
because no messy photographic liquids
were involved.
Even so, Americans were fond of saying Please xerox
that for me
rather that Please make a xerographic
copy.
And that kept the company and its attorneys busy
trying to protect the trademark.
A related term, Xeriscape,
is often used
generically to describe a yard designed to minimize water
consumption. But it is actually a trademark of Denver
Water, which coined it in 1981. It has inspired another
term, zeroscape,
for those hideous yards of cobbles
and concrete.
If companies don't try to protect their trademarks, they can become common words. That happened to aspirin, which was once owned by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company that first formulated acetylsalicyclic acid. Another Bayer drug trademark, heroin (diacetylmorphine), also fell into the public domain.
Such usages seem to go in and out of style. If you read
a novel from the 1930s, you might find someone hoovering
a room,
or kodaking a scene,
because back then,
Hoover was nearly synonymous with vacuum cleaner and Kodak
for photography.
They somehow saved their trademarks, even though cellophane, escalator, linoleum, zipper and thermos all lost their brand-name properties.
The problem, whether you're writing for public
consumption or compiling a dictionary, is How people
actually express themselves
versus How people should
express themselves.
Or as we English majors were told,
descriptive vs. prescriptive.
In other words, I've never asked Martha Do you want
to play the Scrabble-brand crossword game tonight?
That's just not how people talk, and if you quote people
accurately, you'll get That picture from Lebanon looks
like it's been photoshopped
rather than The image
appears to have been digitally manipulated.
It's hard to predict whether Google can maintain its trademark and avoid genericide. But at least the company ought to be pleased that it has a positive connotation. After all, the process could produce conversations like this:
Bad day. My computer microsofted three times and I
had to reboot, then I found out my investments had
qwested.
Mine was worse. My portfolio got enronned. It really
tanked with the talk that the U.S. might halliburton Syria
or Iran.
Yeah, but then my private data got aoled, and then a
water pipe at home bee-peed and flooded the basement
...
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