genericide

A brand that wins too well loses its name.

Nobody asks for ‘a vacuum flask’ or ‘a sticky note’. We say thermos and post-it, even when the thing came off the no-name shelf. A brand name so ordinary that it stands for the whole kind of thing is a genericised trademark. Lawyers call it genericide. In Dutch, where this register began, they are watermerken: watermarks, and marks that have been watered down.

For the language that is a compliment; for the owner it is a risk. A trademark has to tell one product apart from the rest. Once it has become the common name for every product of its kind, and the owner let that happen, the mark can be revoked. Bayer lost Aspirin after the First World War in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, among others. In Germany it is a trademark to this day. Otis lost ‘escalator’ in 1950, partly through its own advertising, which used the word as the name of the thing.

So brands fight back. Xerox spent years telling readers that you cannot ‘xerox’ a document, only copy it on a Xerox. Lego always says LEGO bricks, never ‘legos’. And anyone who owns a trademark in the EU can require a dictionary to say that it is one. It can turn out fine, too: in 2017 an American court ruled that ‘to google’ as a verb does not make Google a generic name.

Spelling lags behind the language. The Guardian’s style guide asks for a vacuum cleaner unless it really is a Hoover, with a capital H when it is, and a small one for a website that hoovers up the prizes. Where exactly that line lies, nobody decides alone. This register keeps track of which words are already across it, and which are still a brand. That is why it also lists brands that are perfectly well protected in law, like Hoover, Kleenex or Sellotape. It is not about what a court says, but about how we talk. Your vote counts.