TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: The Luncheon Meat Associated With Junk Email?

Re: The Luncheon Meat Associated With Junk Email?

Tony P. (kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net)
Sun, 28 Aug 2005 10:37:45 -0400

In article <telecom24.389.11@telecom-digest.org>,
paulcoxwell@tiscali.co.uk says:

>> The "Columbia Journalism Review", a magazine for reporters, often has
>> ads by corporations reminding people about using trademarks as
>> everyday words. I guess the most common example today is using
>> "Xerox" as a verb ("go xerox this letter") or a noun ("I'll send you a
>> xerox of the letter"). It is a trademark and is properly used to
>> describe a particular brand of copier machine or the company that
>> makes them: ("I'll run them off on our Xerox machine").

> Xerox isn't used in a generic sense quite so much in Britain as in the
> States, but we have plenty of other examples.

> "Hoover" is commonly used both as a generic name for any sort of
> vaccuum cleaner, and as a verb, e.g. "I'll just hoover up" or even
> "I'm going to do the hoovering." The Hoover name never became generic
> for any of the other types of appliances they made, such as irons and
> refrigerators. Had the latter been the most widely associated product
> of the company, maybe today people would talk about "Getting some milk
> from the Hoover." Sounds weird, but it could have happened.

Sort of how the big joke during the heyday of DEC's VAX computers was
the ad by a European (Quite likely British) manufacturer of vacuum
cleaners titled "Nothing sucks like a Vax".

That ad made it into quite a few VAX shops.

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