So something to always watch out for is those pesky trademarks that people think should be lowercased but are--as of yet--still uppercase (brand-name). A couple of these I've recently noticed more, and some have been around for a while. The more a trademark is used in printed English, the more chance it has of becoming public domain and the standard term for the item it's referring to. This is so much the case that Xerox has launched huge ad campaigns in the past to try to get the public to say "photocopy" instead of "Xerox."
The following words are trademarked and should be capitalized in manuscripts:
Dumpster (looks weird, right?)
Kleenex
Xerox
Sheetrock (another one that just looks weird)
World Wide Web (this one is particularly garish, although, thank heavens, Chicago, in its latest iteration has conceded to use "website"; hallelujah!)
Realtor (the third unnatural-looking trademark; feels like it should be lowercase)
Levi's
Jacuzzi
Pyrex
Band-Aid
Vaseline
Ping-Pong
Google (although a lot of editors will use "google" lowercase as the verb, while keeping the company/etc. uppercase)
App (Amazon and Apple are in a lawsuit about this very thing right now: whether "app" is an Apple trademark; the more the term is used as a generic abbreviation for "application," the less of a case Apple has)
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I'd seen Dumpster and Realator capitalized, but Sheet Rock and Ping-Pong were new to me.
ReplyDeleteAnother one (of many) that I wanted to add is "Mace" as in the pepper spray (not the medieval spiky weapon).
ReplyDeleteI need to keep this list somewhere. A few of those surprised me.
ReplyDeleteGreat list Kirk. Its so nice to have you helping us all out with the nitty-gritty of writing. Nitty gritty's not a trademark right? lol.
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