Memorial day and trademarks

We were invited down to the southern end of Illinois for Memorial Day weekend by our friend Deborah. Her grandparents live down there on a lake that’s heated by a coal power plant (though supposedly, the lake is there to cool the plant). It was a fun trip, full of large meals and the expected lake activities: boat rides, swimming, watercrafts. They own a couple jet skis that the whole family referred to as “Polarises.” I kind of chuckled each time I heard it, but I guess it’s the same as calling a photocopy a Xerox, or calling a tissue a Kleenex, or Band-aids or Q-Tips, though those are pretty common, now. I was just amused because when I hear Polaris, I think snowmobile… not as a generic term, but because I thought that was their main product. I wonder if some thing could’ve been a Yamaha or Kawasaki or LG if those companies had just focused on one product, instead of making everything. Actually, wasn’t “jet ski” a brand name owned by Kawasaki for a while? I looked it up; It was! There are tons of “genericized trademarks,” the examples they listed on wikipedia included Aspirin, Cellophane, Dry ice, Escalator, Kerosene, Laundromat, Linoleum, Thermos, Trampoline, Videotape, Yo-Yo and Zipper! I think some of the ones in their “still protected” list are pretty common, too: Bubble Wrap? Dumpster? Anyway, there are pictures at flickr … some from the boat rides and some random shots from the City Museum detour that we took on the way home. It was raining, and they wouldn’t let us go outside, so I didn’t turn out my usual batch of just-under-a-million shots.