1034. First, we look at how writers should use trademarked terms like "Kleenex" and "Google," including when to capitalize them and how to avoid legal pitfalls. Then, we look at the way the word "thank" evolved alongside changing social conventions — who got thanked and why, and how the word itself evolved.
1034. First, we look at how writers should use trademarked terms like "Kleenex" and "Google," including when to capitalize them and how to avoid legal pitfalls. Then, we look at the way the word "thank" evolved alongside changing social conventions — who got thanked and why, and how the word itself evolved.
The trademark segment was written by Natalie Schilling, a professor emerita of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, who runs a forensic linguistics consulting firm. You can find her on LinkedIn.
The "thank you" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about what makes something a trademark and how to use trademarked terms in your writing, and then in honor of Thanksgiving in the U.S., we'll talk about why we use the phrase "thank you."
by Natalie Schilling
If you’ve ever Ubered over to a friend’s house, zoomed with a colleague, xeroxed a document, googled an unfamiliar term, or wished you knew how to photoshop images better, then you may be an accessory to genericide.
"Genericide" is what trademark experts call it when society turns brand names into plain old everyday words, or generics. Brand names are usually trademarked to keep competitors from using them and possibly stealing your customers or cheapening your name. But according to trademark law, you can’t trademark a generic term. So you can see why slipping from brand name to generic status is a big deal – hence the scary-sounding term "genericide."
Companies spend a lot of time and money protecting trademarks, so how does genericide happen? Well, technically, trademarks are adjectives modifying nouns, as in ‘Band-Aid brand adhesive bandage," "Kleenex tissue," and "ChapStick lip balm." It's easy to shorten these phrases, especially in everyday speech. I’m much more likely to ask you to hand me a Kleenex than a Kleenex tissue, and I’ll probably offer you a Popsicle more quickly than a Popsicle brand ice pop. And so the original noun phrase – the trademark adjective "Kleenex" and the noun it modifies, "tissue" – gets shortened to just the noun, "Kleenex." From there, the nouns easily change the same way we change other nouns. They can be pluralized, as in “Hand me a couple of Band-Aids” or “Let’s get two Ubers.” In rare cases, they might even be de-pluralized. I bet you didn’t know that a baby’s “onesie” is technically a "Gerber brand Onesies infant bodysuit."
Trademarks are also sometimes used as verbs, and then their shapes change even more. A verb can be present or past tense, and singular or plural. What I Googled today, I Googled yesterday. And when my sister uses a search engine, she Googles. In fact, we can really get carried away with all our Googling, Photoshopping, and Zooming.
The trouble with all this shape-shifting is that when we lop off trademark adjectives from the nouns they’re supposed to modify, and when we further modify the trademarks by adding endings like "-s" and "-ing," we forget that the word was ever an adjective describing a generic "thing" – a tissue or a baby’s garment – and we begin thinking of the trademark itself as the generic. You may be somewhat aware that Post-it is a brand name, but did you also know that so are Bubble Wrap, Velcro, and Styrofoam? And once consumers forget that a word refers to a particular brand of product and not just the product itself, then genericide can set in. Trademarks can be lost, profits can tumble, and companies can lose the good name associated with their product.
Over the years some trademarks have fallen victim to genericide and have actually been removed from the trademark register – from "air fryer" to "aspirin," "laundromat" to "linoleum," and "teleprompter" to "trampoline." The process is less common these days than it used to be, largely because companies protect their brands vigorously, through cease-and-desist letters, P.R. campaigns stressing their branding, and full-on legal battles. And there’s an important distinction in trademark law between how consumers use terms and what they believe about the terms. A trademark doesn’t really die until people come to think of it as referring to a kind of product in general rather than the source – the brand – of that product.
To help quell our natural tendency to genericize brand names, and to keep companies from unfairly restricting how we can use everyday terms, trademark law governs what can and can't be trademarked in the first place. As a rule, you can’t trademark an adjective that simply describes the product you’re selling without offering anything extra. I can’t call my line of automobiles “Fast Cars” or my mailing service “Speedy Delivery,” since most manufacturers’ cars are fast, and presumably all shipping companies would like to promote themselves as “speedy.” The trademark office says “descriptive” terms like these are “weak” and aren't likely to be granted trademarks.
So-called “suggestive” marks are better. These are words that “suggest” a relationship between the adjective and noun but only indirectly, through what trademark lawyers refer to as a "leap of the imagination." "Mustang" automobile is suggestive, since strong, swift horses suggest fast, powerful cars. "Netflix" is another one, since it connotes movies or "flicks" that are ordered online, over the internet.
The strongest trademarks are so-called “arbitrary” or “fanciful” marks. These are either made-up words, like “Xerox,” or existing words that are applied to products they don’t really relate to or describe in any way. “Apple” when applied to computers or a record label is fanciful. But context is everything, and so you can’t trademark “Apple pie” for the dessert since in that case, it’s descriptive.
The line between these types of potential trademarks is by no means sharp, though, and attorneys sometimes bring in experts in the scientific study of words, phrases, and their meanings – linguists – to help determine strength of mark. For example, linguist Ron Butters once provided expert testimony which hinged on whether “kettle chips” is suggestive, and therefore trademark-able, since these thick, crunchy chips aren’t actually cooked in kettles. To make his assessment, Butters considered principles of semantics (literal meaning) and pragmatics (meaning in context). For example, he looked at the way “kettle chips” is used in the context of advertising copy, consumer reviews, and media stories. His conclusion, and that of the courts, was that “kettle” is actually not suggestive when referring to chips, or even descriptive. Instead, it’s generic, and so it can’t be trademarked. That’s why today, when you’re hungry for a snack, you can reach for a bag of “Kettle Brand” potato chips, “Lay’s Kettle Cooked,” or Utz’s “Kettle Classics,” and know you’re getting just the type of thick, delicious chip you crave.
While most of us contribute to genericide in casual conversation by using Kleenexes, Xeroxing, and taking Ubers, things are trickier in writing: Should you capitalize trademarks or not, do you need to include a little “TM” or “R” symbol after the term like we see on labels, and do you really have to use clunky phrasing like “Kleenex brand facial tissue” to be correct – or avoid run-ins with the law? Given all these issues, it’s usually best to go with the easy fix – just use generic terms like “facial tissues’ and “photocopying.” The only time you might want to stick with the trademarked term is in creative writing, especially in fictional dialog. It’s probably going to sound stilted to have two characters talking about using the “Uber brand rideshare service” instead of “Ubering” – unless your story happens to be about trademark lawyers!
And when you do use them, the AP Stylebook and The Chicago Manual of Style usually recommend keeping the trademark capitalized, although Chicago notes that the Merriam-Webster dictionary has lowercase entries for the verbs "google," "photoshop," and "xerox." But don't worry about using the "TM"or "R" symbols. They aren't required by law.
Genericide may sound criminal, but really it’s a natural linguistic process called "semantic broadening" – where a word for something specific gradually becomes more general over time. It’s happened historically – for example, even the word "dog" used to be a subtype of the more general category, "hound." And it keeps happening. We only started "googling" a few decades ago, and most of us have been talking about "Zooming" for even less time than that. Perhaps ironically, the most widely used trademarks are the ones that are most at risk of genericide – victims, in a way, of their own success.
That segment was written by Natalie Schilling, a professor emerita of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and who runs a forensic linguistics consulting firm. You can find her on LinkedIn.
by Valerie Fridland
American lawmakers created the national Thanksgiving holiday in 1870, but a day of giving thanks had actually been proclaimed by the nation’s very first President, George Washington, and similar feast days were celebrated by colonial settlers even earlier. Today, Americans treat the day as a secular holiday, but the first thanksgivings often included prayer and gratitude for good fortune, a meaning of the word "thanks" that seems to harken back to Old English.
A Word for Your Thoughts
While the exact expression "'thank you" doesn’t appear until about the 14th century, the word "thank" has been around since the earliest days of English. We find it written as "thanc" (T-H-A-N-C) in religious works and historical chronicles dating back to the eighth century.
Intriguingly, given that "thank" descended from the ancient Indo-European word "tong," meaning "think or feel," it first meant "thought," as in this rough translation of the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary: "No one becomes wiser in thought than he needs to be."
"Thanc"’s shift from thinking to thanking eventually seems to have come from the type of thinking involved: having favorable thoughts or feelings toward someone, which developed into gratitude.
About whom did Old English speakers tend to have these favorable thoughts? Well, most often, about God. Some of the earliest uses of the word in this manner are from gospels and religious works. Even in secular texts such as Beowulf, God, as opposed to an individual, is a frequent object of thanking.
In early English culture, polite behavior as we understand it today wasn't yet a concept. During the time of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, it was your duty to perform the service of your rank and station and to offer aid and protection to the people in your group. Instead of expressing social niceties, people enhanced their image by boasting excessively about their feats as warriors.
When people look at the stories we have that still exist from the time, they find that it was important to pay heed to your place in the social order, for example by addressing people with titles such as "lord," "lady," "brother" and so on, but that people didn't seem to worry much about coming off as rude. Old English society functioned not because people did what they liked or flattered each other, but because people did as they must and as they believed God’s will commanded.
The Arrival of 'Courtesy Culture' and its Impact on English
So what caused the change? In a word, society. The coming of the Normans in 1066 brought with it massive social change. Not only did the people in the court start using Norman French, but, over time, French courtesy culture became an important part of Anglo-Norman society in England and, with it, a more recognizable language of politeness. In fact, it is from French that the very words "courtesy" and "politeness" enter English.
In the Elizabethan period, you can easily find examples of thanking in writings from authors such as Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare, although you generally won't find the shortened form we mostly use today: "thank you." Instead, you'll find gratitude in full-sentence glory: "I thank you" or "I thank thee." During this period, thanking also often occurred with displays of deference that alluded to social rank, such as the use of titles (as in "I thank you, your ladyship"). And, once we hit the 18th century, expressing gratitude, along with other types of polite speech such as greetings and complimenting, became integral to showing that you were of the right class and breeding.
Just a simple thank you
Now, you can find the simple versions, "thank you" and "thanks," as far back as the 14th century, but it seems that these forms didn't become the routine stand-alone go-tos until well after the act of thanking had become required. We don't see it widely used in its abbreviated form until the 19th century, when thanking everyone, not just upper crust peers or betters, was more common. By the time that happened, its meaning had also become more ritualistic, and so a shortened form was as inevitable as needing a nap after a big turkey dinner.
Onward to thanks-giving
Given that the word "thank" evolved from an ancient word for thought, it leaves us a linguistic reminder that gratitude starts in the mind, not in the mouth. Its evolution is also a lesson that we have all become worthy of gratitude, no matter who we are.
So whether you say "I thank thee," "thank you," or simply "thanks," Thanksgiving gives us a day to be grateful regardless of how we say it.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." A version of this story originally appeared on Psychology Today, and you can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Finally, I have a familect story from Martha:
When my sons were young, we called empty toilet paper tubes "toot toot peanut butter." This happened because my older son was in daycare, and the teacher taught them a little rhyme.
"Put a peanut on the track,
Toot toot peanut butter."
The kids each had a toilet paper tube to use as a train whistle. I guess my son thought that was the name of the toilet paper tube. His younger brother picked it up from him, and we all called it that for years.
Thanks, Martha! That's definitely a familect because nobody would ever know what you mean when you call it that. How funny!
If you want to share your familect story, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or do it in a voice chat on WhatsApp like Martha did, and both of those are in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin and Nat Hoopes in marketing; Holly Hutchings in digital operations; Dan Feierabend in audio; Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; and Morgan Christianson in advertising, who recently loved the book "Bye Baby" by Carola Lovering.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.
***
The following references for the "thank you" segment did not appear in the podcast but are included here for completeness.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Demmen, Jane. 2011. Nineteenth-century English politeness: Negative
politeness, conventional indirect requests and the rise of the individual self. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 12 (1/2). pp. 49-81.
Jacobsson, M. 2002. Thank you and thanks in Early Modern English. ICAME Journal 26: 63-80.
"thank, n.". OED Online. September 2022. Oxford University Press.
"welcome, n.1, adj., and int.". OED Online. September 2022. Oxford University Press