A wordsmith’s enigmatic exploration

One of the signs of our times is how many words we routinely use that properly aren’t words, but trademarks. A popular expression these days is to say ‘someone has drunk the Kool-Aid’, meaning he has swallowed propaganda and is regurgitating an official line. But, of course, Kool-Aid is a commercial product, aiming to be a refreshing drink and not a substitute bromide for unpalatable views. When you describe someone as having drunk the Kool-Aid, you’re actually running afoul of copyright law. And yet not being aware of the expression is worse, since it is used so often, accompanied by a knowing smirk.

Other such terms abound. If you cut your finger and ask for a Band-Aid, you’re actually mentioning a specific company’s trademark; strictly speaking, what you want is an ‘adhesive bandage’ or ‘adhesive plaster’. There was a time when people would go to ‘Xerox’ something when they wanted to photocopy it. And today, of course, one is constantly Googling something when one is looking it up. (The process of using a word like this is known as anthimeria.)

Seeing your trademark becoming a commonly-used verb must be bliss for marketing people, but somewhat more worrying for their legal department. After all, too much success can hurt a trademark: the pharmaceutical company Bayer AG marketed acetylsalicylic acid under the trade name Aspirin, but taking ‘aspirin’ for a headache became such a common experience that courts ruled the name was now generic and could no longer be trademarked!

The same thing was in danger of happening to ‘Polaroids’. This was the trade name for a special kind of camera: once you took a picture on it, the snapshots emerged from the apparatus and revealed themselves in minutes, even as you watched the images develop in front of your eyes. No one called these ‘instant cameras’, the generic name; they were simply Polaroids. Trademark protection might well have collapsed—except that the emergence of digital photography made the Polaroid experience much less magical. No one takes Polaroids any more.

That fate could still befall ‘Rollerblade’—roller skates which have a single row of wheels down the middle of the skating shoe instead of two rows of wheels on the left and right of the skate. Kids who go rollerblading would never say they’re wearing ‘inline skates’, even if the wheels on their feet are made by another company. Rollerblade may soon find itself in the same position as aspirin—as a term so generically used that it can no longer enjoy trademark protection.

When you find yourself sniffing in public and in need of facial tissues, what do you ask for? If you’re in America, the chances are you’d ask for a Kleenex, since that was the brand name that pioneered the facial tissue revolution and put an end to people sneezing ostentatiously into their pocket handkerchiefs. Elsewhere, of course, there are so many competing brands of facial tissues that ‘Kleenex’ doesn’t have quite the same resonance as it enjoys in its original market in the US. Also in America, people in need of lip balm during the cold winters are quite likely to request a ChapStick—a product to counter chapped lips that has been around in the US since the late 1800s. It specifically refers to a brand of lip balm that is sold in a tube and applied like lipstick.

And then there are the ubiquitous ‘Velcro’ strips, the trademark of a company with that name which invented and patented hook and loop fasteners. The company made up the word ‘Velcro’ from combining two French words: velour (velvet) and crochet (hook). But we use the word indiscriminately even when the product we are using might have been manufactured by another company. Zipper, windbreaker, Scotch tape, escalator, hula hoop, yo-yo, and dumpster are other commonly used words that began life as trademarks, now long forgotten.

Many five-star hotels make it a point to include a Jacuzzi in their larger bathroom suites. But how many of us are aware that that, too, is a trademarked name? The concept of a hot tub was developed by an Italian company founded and run by seven Italian brothers in Northern Italy—named, of course, Jacuzzi.

For linguists, the process of a trademarked term becoming a generic term, such as Xerox being used to mean ‘photocopy’, is known as anthimeria. For the marketing folks, it’s called genericization, generification, or even genericide (the last uses the suffix for ‘murder’—thus ‘fratricide’ is the killing of a brother, and genericide refers to the ‘killing’ of a trademark through its becoming generic). Google, Xerox, Hoover, and B. F. Goodrich (who made zippers) have all fought genericide and either lost or are in the process of losing their struggles to protect their trademarks. (Google has a history of monitoring dictionaries ever since their name became a synonym for internet searching, arguing that generic use erodes the value of their brand. But they can’t stop everyone who tells you to ‘google it’!)

American life seems to lend itself readily to genericization. Aspirin, Band-Aid, ChapStick, cellophane, dumpster, escalator, granola, Jell-O, Jacuzzi, Kleenex, Laundromat, linoleum, pogo stick, Post-it, Q-tip, Rollerblade, Scotch tape, tarmac, thermos, Tupperware, TV dinner, Vaseline, Velcro, and yo-yo (in alphabetical order) all began life as trademarked brand names, but their copyright protection has long since collapsed in practice. This may perversely reflect the success of their marketing: they so entered public consciousness that people stopped thinking of any other term to represent the item or the function it performed. Let’s face it: go through the list and practically no one would be inclined to replace those terms with their proper equivalents, which, in order, should be: headache remedy, sticking plaster, lip balm, transparent wrapping material, rubbish container, moving staircase, healthy breakfast cereal, edible jelly candy, whirlpool bath, facial tissue, wall-mounted automatic washing machine, synthetic floor covering, jumping toy pole with spring, sticky notes, cotton-tipped swab, in-line skates, clear adhesive tape, asphalt road surface, vacuum flask, plastic storage containers, frozen pre-prepared meal, petroleum jelly ointment, and a discshaped toy that moves up and down! So much easier to use the brand name as shorthand, isn’t it?

But what surprised even me is the discovery of a number of commonly-used words that I didn’t even know had ever been trademarks. ‘Dry ice’, for instance, was trademarked in 1925 by the Dry Ice Corporation, but the term ‘dry ice’ is now simply understood to mean solid CO2. It lost its trademark in 1932. ‘Heroin’ is an even bigger surprise. The drug, derived from morphine, was named ‘heroin’, trademarked by Bayer in 1898 based on the German word heroisch, meaning ‘heroic, strong’; but trademark protection was stripped from Bayer, a German company, during World War I in 1917. Similarly, the first modern ‘trampoline’ was built and trademarked in 1936, and comes from the Spanish for ‘diving board’—trampolin. But no one uses any other word for a jumping board on which kids bounce up and down. The most astonishing is ‘kerosene’: it was registered as a trademark in 1854 by Abraham Gesner, who described ‘kerosene’ (derived from the Greek ‘kerns’ for wax) as a combustible hydrocarbon liquid. Only two companies were allowed to use the trademarked term, until eventually, and inevitably, kerosene became a victim of genericide.

A number of words are still trademarked, but they are so commonly used that they have passed into the language already. When you hear people talking of their ‘adrenaline’ pumping in moments of excitement or fear, they’re using a trademark for epinephrine owned by Parke-Davis. Hockey and tennis fans are familiar with their sports being played on ‘AstroTurf’, an artificial ground-covering material trademarked by Monsanto. People mailing breakable items like to package them in ‘Bubble Wrap’, but if they call their inflated cushioning by that word, they are using the trademark of a company called Sealed Air.

When we heard of President Nixon promoting ‘Ping Pong diplomacy’ with China, we assumed that was merely the American expression for table tennis, just as they say ‘soccer’ for ‘football’, but it turns out to be a trademark owned by Parker Brothers. Even the generic name ‘superhero’ turns out to have been trademarked by DC Comics and Marvel Comics. If you don’t believe me, google it!

(Excerpted with permission from Shashi Tharoor’s A Wonderland of Words; published by Aleph Book Company)