“Apple is on the verge of doing what few others have: change the English language,” Mae Anderson reports for The Associated Press.
“When you have a boo-boo, you reach for a Band-Aid not a bandage. When you need to blow your nose, you ask for Kleenex not tissue,” Anderson reports. “And if you want to buy a tablet computer, there’s a good chance there’s only one name you’ll remember. ‘For the vast majority, the idea of a tablet is really captured by the idea of an iPad,’ says Josh Davis, a manager at Abt Electronics in Chicago. “They gave birth to the whole category and brought it to life.'”
Anderson reports, “Companies trip over themselves to make their brands household names. But only a few brands become so engrained in the lexicon that they’re synonymous with the products themselves. This so-called ‘genericization’ can be both good and bad for companies like Apple, which must balance their desire for brand recognition with their disdain for brand deterioration… A company’s biggest fear is that their brand name becomes so commonly used to describe a product that a judge rules that it’s too ‘generic’ to be a trademark. That means that any product — even inferior ones — can legally use the name.”
Read more in the full article here.