Trademark Trashing

Part of my job as a copywriter is to take what other people have written and make it better.  One of the things I see most often is an inadvertent tendency to turn trademarked words, which need initial caps, into generic words, which don’t. 

Some of these words have slipped into our language and lost their trademark value, such as old-school linoleum, thought to be the first product name that became a generic in the early 20^th century. Others like aspirin, is still a trademark of Bayer in dozens of countries, but considered a generic term in the U.S.

Many trademarks should not be used alone, but paired with a generic product descriptor.  For example, never write “The house has a jacuzzi,” but rather “The house has a Jacuzzi® whirlpool bath.”

Here are the Top Seven trademarks I often see used incorrectly:

Jacuzzi® is owned by Jacuzzi Brands. The brand should always be used with a generic descriptor, such as Jacuzzi® hot tubs. Never add an ‘s to make Jacuzzi possessive.

Jet Ski® is a trademark of Kawasaki. The generic term is “personal watercraft.”

Bubble Wrap® is owned by Sealed Air Corporation. Don’t use it alone ‒ always say “Bubble Wrap® cushioning material.”

Popsicle® ice pop, Creamsicle® cream pop, Fudgsicle® fudge pop, etc. are all part of the SICLE™ trademark. Always use each with the applicable “pop” descriptor.

VELCRO® closely guards its trademarks. At last count it had 29 of them. Always use the word “brand” and a descriptor. If it’s not a VELCRO® brand fastener, use the generic term “hook and loop fastener.”

BAND-AID® brand is often incorrectly written as bandaid, but as far as I can tell, BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages is still a trademark of Johnson & Johnson.

Weed Eater® is a Husqvarna Consumer Outdoor Products brand and should never be written as weedeater.

If you’ve used dumpster like many of us, you’ll be glad to know the "trademarked and uppercased" Dumpster has been trashed. Earlier this year, the AP Stylebook officially sanctioned dumpster as the generic term for any large metal trash bin. Other long-time brands you may be tempted to use without their trademarks include Plexiglas®, Xerox®, Hula Hoop® Kleenex®, Ping-Pong®, Frisbee®, and Styrofoam®. Newer brands include Post-It® Brand Products and the TASER® conducted electrical weapon. Never write taser in lowercase. 

What other trademarks do you see misused and abused in marketing? Has anything else you see here become generic? What about in magazine writing and fiction? Are caps enough, with no registration mark needed?

Comma Sutra

If you thought this post would be about Kama Sutra, the Hindu art of marital pleasure, I guess I’ve misled you into reading another of my diatribes about punctuation, a significantly less scintillating topic. Sorry, but copywriters are all about hooking people with headlines. We just can’t help ourselves, even when we assume the Lotus Position or fetal position, and then fervently meditate, suck our thumbs or both, none of which is a scintillating practice at all. That last sentence apparently sent me into a comma frenzy, which I already regret.

 “I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.”

                                                                                                        — Oscar Wilde

 "I can definitely relate to that kind of productivity problem, Oscar baby."

                                                                                                        — Malia Kline

Since my beloved AP Stylebook and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style didn’t come out until the 1950s, I’m sure it was tough back when Mr. Wilde wrote Lady Windemere’s Fan, since all he probably had to guide him was this 1838 grammar book by Robert Lowth as uncovered by Grammar Girl.

Whoa! When the second sentence of a grammar text has eight commas, two semicolons, one colon, and the word “hath” twice in one sentence, you know you’re in big trouble, which brings me to something that hath been bothering me lately. 

Everybody these days starts emails by saying:

Hi Malia

What happened to the comma (Hi, Malia) that we always used back when people wrote letters and the punctuation rules of direct address applied. Maybe people have started dropping the comma because they think “Hi Malia” is like “Dear John,” even though it’s not. Hi needs a comma because it is an interjection like wow. Dear doesn’t need a comma because it is an adjective modifying John.

What do you think? Is "Hi Oscar" the way I should start my email to Oscar Wilde about commas and changing punctuation styles? Or should we just "Quija board" him and see what he spells out?

Hyphen Nation?

Maybe if I lived in a French-Canadian city, or somewhere such as Winston-Salem, Wilkes-Barre or even Fuquay-Varina, I might be natural fan of hyphens. As it is, I have to pause and cogitate every time I use one, fearful that I am making a punctuation faux pas. Judging by writing I see day after day, I just don’t think America is a hyphen nation. I’d go so far as to say that we seem to have a love-hate relationship with hyphens, and we aren’t too crazy about dashes either.

My beloved AP Stylebook describes hyphens as “joiners.” Lest you jump to the conclusion that hyphens like to be dues-paying members of clubs and associations like Hyphens without Borders, Habitat for Hyphens, or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Hyphens, AP Style offers this clarification: “Use hyphens only when not using them causes confusion.” Say what?

Here’s an example: you hyphenate small-business owner, because without the hyphen a reader might think you’re describing a business owner who is short. Got it. But there’s another rule that rightly confounds many people I know. You should hyphenate two words that express a single concept when used as a compound modifier in front of a noun. Before you flash back to your pimply self in middle school grammar class and quit reading, here’s a confusion-free example: you hyphenate fourth quarter when it describes a noun in a sentence such as this: “He scored a fourth-quarter touchdown.” Nix the hyphen if you write “He scored a touchdown in the fourth quarter.” For the same reason, you would write, “She is a well-known woman,” but also “She is also a woman who is well respected” (no hyphen).

I would like to cautiously reveal that if an adverb ends in –ly, you never hyphenate it in front of a noun. But if I add that tidbit, I’m afraid you’ll ride me out of town on a rail, straight toward frosty-cold Minneapolis-St. Paul. If your AP Stylebook happens to be at the cleaners, you can read more about hyphenation in the National Geographic Style Manual.

Acronym Angst Part II

When I first learned there’s a website called AcronymFinder that has more than five million acronyms, abbreviations and initialisms (say what?), I broke out in a sweat and stopped just short of losing my lunch.  I am not a big fan of acronyms, and I would never “friend” one, especially ACE which stands for 361 different things. Yikes!

At the risk of being labeled an acronymophobic (I just put that in to drive the spell checker crazy), I delved further into which parts of society tended to fall into the abyss of acronym abuse.  I was surprised to find that only five of the 361 meanings for ACE fell into the categories of “chat,” slang and pop culture. Organizations and schools had a whopping 159, military and government 91, business and finance 83, science and medicine 70 and IT 55. Don't tell AcronymFinder, but this breakdown doesn't add up to 361, which proves that staring at three letters too long makes your lose your bond with numbers.

I suppose ACE is clever, because it implies you are good at something, but even ASE stood for more than 100 things.  I was afraid to look up how many meanings there were for the acronym ASS.

There are actual whole words out there, people, not just capital letters, and they actually mean something without having to figure them out. If you’re not like me and like acronyms, I’d love to hear your favorites. I promise to keep an open mind. Yeah, right.

Acronym Angst

Maybe I’m suffering from a high BMI (body mass index), undiagnosed ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), or, heaven forbid, not enough HRT (hormone replacement therapy), but medical acronyms give me an unhealthy BP (blood pressure). 

There’s a number on the lab report from my last physical called BUN (blood urea nitrogen), which you’d think had something to do with the size of my spreading derriere, but is really an indication of kidney function. How can I remember if my HDL is too high or too low when I can’t even remember what HDL stands for (high density lipoprotein)?

I knew I was entering health care gobbledygook land years ago when I got my daughter’s immunization record from the pediatrician. When I finally got used to deciphering MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) and DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis), along came HPV (human papilloma virus) to be immunized against.

Maybe my acronym angst is just the result of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) since it's been raining here most of the summer. All I know is that one time when I was overdosed on acronyms after reading too many news stories, I had to think hard to remember whether DNC stands for a political convention or a gynecological procedure. 

How about you? Does the insane proliferation of acronyms, in medical jargon, sports, texts and tweets, send you on a bullet train to crazy town too?

I Need Help

People often tell me I need help for a variety of reasons, but one in particular keeps rearing its ugly head. I know there are much bigger issues that deserve my righteous indignation, but I can’t help but have a mini melt-down whenever I see the “d” or “ed” carelessly dropped from adjectives. This perversion of the English language makes me want to cover my eyes before the error takes up permanent residence in my brain. But I’m often driving when I see the missing “d,” so I usually resort to just screaming loud enough to wake up the other slightly drooling people in the drive-thru (which is how AP Style says to spell it) or drive-through (if you believe Merriam-Webster instead).

Earlier today, there it was again when I pulled up and barked my order for a chicken sandwich – the biggest “d drop” offender of them all, at least in the South – “ice tea.” I’ve always thought it was “iced tea,” unless you happen to be writing about the American rapper-turned-actor, Ice-T.

After pulling out of the drive–thru back onto Hwy. 74, I got behind a U-Haul (at least YouTube knew how to spell “you"). This orange and white facilitator of a horizontally or downwardly mobile society boasted that it “holds a queen size bed.” Shouldn’t it be queen-sized bed? Or maybe even “queen bed” if you want to avoid the “d” issue altogether?

When I got home, I started worrying that maybe I didn’t know my iced tea from a hole in the ground, so I put “Strunk and White” into my favorite search engine. As fate, karma and SEO would have it, I got a page for “The Strunk and White Homeboys Tote Bag by CafePress. The promotional copy below this enticing item used the words “ice tea machines.” Oh, Strunk! Oh, White! Oh, anybody! Please help me by sharing your insights, rules and ramblings about the “d” dilemma.

Also, what about wax paper? That’s how the leading brand’s box reads, but I always thought it should be “waxed paper.” 

Good with Numbers

Before you panic and click “close,” let me clarify that even though the title of this post is “Good with Numbers,” I’m not talking about math here. Sure, math teachers say there are “rational” numbers, but writers know all numbers are irrational, even when they are properly medicated. And what’s up with that Pythagorean Theorem?

Anyway, as journalism students and writers of any ilk can tell you, AP Style has a passel of rules about numbers, some rational and some not so much. I started wondering why the AP Stylistas listed the rules for using what some might call “numbers” under the headline “numerals.” Ask.com, my go-to-source for rational and irrational information, described the difference this way:

“A number is an idea or a concept in the mind that answers the question “How many?”

Though this concept “in the mind” was getting too cerebral for me already, I bravely trudged on:

 “A number is not viewable or tangible, whereas a numeral is a name or symbol that represents a number. A numeral, unlike a number, can be written down and seen and physically manipulated.”  

Okeydokey, then. Glad we cleared that up. Here’s a quick overview of the numeral/number rules that seem to give clients and others in my world the most trouble:

·        Spell out numbers from one to nine, but use figures for 10 and above

·        Always use figures for ages: The boy is 8 years old. Use hyphens if you use an age as an adjective before a noun: A 5-year-old boy.

·        When you use a numeral as a plural, don’t add an apostrophe (as if it is a possessive). So it should be: The woman is in her 50s (not her 50’s). The crash happened in the 1930s (not 1930’s).

·        Use figures for percent, and note that it’s not per cent (two words). 1 percent, 50 percent off, 2.5 percent, 14 to 15 percent (not 14-15 percent).

*The spell-checker is freaking out about okeydokey, but that’s what Merriam-Webster says, so I’m going with it anyway. Take that, you spell-checking robatoid! So, has anybody got any talk-back or sass-mouth for me about how to write with numbers/numerals?