And linoleum. Aspirin was also a brand name, but the Bayer company was forced to give it up as part of the peace settlement following World War I, so that case is a little different.
Appropriate for what? Google is subject to the same risk of genericide.
I have this dim memory of watching the Iran-Contra hearings and seeing some Congressman or other saying that he’d received a letter from the Xerox Corporation asking him not to use “xerox” to refer to non-Xerox photocopying and apologizing for doing it…
On the TV show “Veronica Mars” the lead character has said “Google” a number of times both as a noun and a verb, including saying she’s going to google someone or something, but when they show her search results she’s using a (I assume) fictitious site called something like “Zowie.”
I would love to hear more about this.
Okay. Here’s a link I found about the history of aspirin. Apparently Bayer lost rights to the name through the Treaty of Versailles—a headache I’m sure they didn’t need!
I didn’t know that Heroin® was also a trademark. I guess Bayer doesn’t care to remind people of that!
A while back, an ad campaign encouraged verbing their trademark. We were told to Simonize® our cars.
If you have a DVR of another brand, you might still “Tivo®” a show while you’re shopping.
Just FYI, only the owner of a trademark is required to use the “registered” or “trademark” bug.
That seems harsh.
You cover the inner walls of the ring with the hook side of the Hook-and-Loop product and the sport is to get the bull to stick.
Plus if you call using a copy machine “Xeroxing,” and a Walmart-brand copy machine eats your cat, Xerox wouldn’t want their name anywhere near the crappy competitor’s product.
I agree about “googling.” Seems like 99% of the time, the user will indeed be using google.com to google something.
And before Google’s rise to dominance, none of the earlier search engines had the market share, nor the catchy name, to pull off a similar feat.
Adobe has a snippy page of guidelines for properly using their trademarks which admonishes 3rd parties to never use “Photoshop” as a verb. (Link is an HTML version of a PDF)
I don’t know what, if anything, they could do if you chose to ignore their guidelines.
I don’t know about that – It seems to me that before Google took off, Yahoo was similarly dominant in the search engine “market.” Anyway, the basic irony is that the more successful a company is, the more it risks losing its trademark to generic meaning.
Exactly nothing. They might complain, but you can safely ignore them. The basic concept of trademark law is consumer protection and if consumers decide that a word is more useful as a generic term, then there’s nothing a trademark owner can do to stop them.
I keep misreading this title as “Band Names as Verbs”, and I gotta admit that “Verbing the Noun” would make a good band name.
OK, now that I think back, you’re probably right. However, I still maintain the other half of my assertion (lack of sufficiently catchy name); thank goodness we don’t refer to “yahooing” a desired name or topic. 
In case nobody noticed, Kleenex can be used as a verb.
“The window was fogging up so I Kleenexed it.”
“My nose is running, so I’m going to Kleenex it.”
“Bob is busy Kleenexing the mess he made when he spilled his Coke.”
Well, it’s been 20-25 years since I’ve been directly involved; maybe stations are more casual about this now. But in those days, stations did react like that.
Perhaps the most effective part of the letter from Xerox was the line at the bottom saying “cc: <local Xerox distributors>”. Some of those local distributors were advertisers on the station, often with Xerox paying part of the advertising costs. The implied threat that they might be annoyed enough to pull their ads, or pressured by Xerox to do so, was enough to get station management to respond. An apology letter and a memo to staff cost almost nothing if it kept an advertiser happy.
Then take a gander at this page
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Nature vaccums a whore’s abs?