Jens Ropers wrote: Actually, from the perspective of the owners of those respective trademarks (Jeep, Jacuzzi, and Xerox) it would be totally inaccurate and irresponsible. You may not personally care about such things, but they would go to a great deal of effort to discourage people from using those terms incorrectly. Wittingly or not, the elements of your analogy have a significant point in common, which is that these are all trademarks in danger of genericide (fortunately, a much less violent demise than those you have been arguing about). Interestingly enough, I discovered that our article on napalm states that it too is a trademark, belonging in this case to Dow Chemical. However, my initial research was unable to verify this claim. Does anybody have a source that could back this up? I rather wonder whether napalm as a trademark might already have gone generic, given how many people use it to mean any gasoline-based military incendiary device, as shown by this discussion. Instead of flaming each other from divergent points of view, perhaps we could redirect our focus to getting facts correct in our articles. --Michael Snow ______________________

Jens Ropers wrote: Actually, from the perspective of the owners of those respective trademarks (Jeep, Jacuzzi, and Xerox) it would be totally inaccurate and irresponsible. You may not personally care about such things, but they would go to a great deal of effort to discourage people from using those terms incorrectly. Wittingly or not, the elements of your analogy have a significant point in common, which is that these are all trademarks in danger of genericide (fortunately, a much less violent demise than those you have been arguing about). Interestingly enough, I discovered that our article on napalm states that it too is a trademark, belonging in this case to Dow Chemical. However, my initial research was unable to verify this claim. Does anybody have a source that could back this up? I rather wonder whether napalm as a trademark might already have gone generic, given how many people use it to mean any gasoline-based military incendiary device, as shown by this discussion. Instead of flaming each other from divergent points of view, perhaps we could redirect our focus to getting facts correct in our articles. --Michael Snow