> 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.