{"id":10961,"date":"2005-10-05T00:13:24","date_gmt":"2005-10-05T00:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2005\/10\/genericide-xeroxing-photoshop.html"},"modified":"2005-10-05T00:13:24","modified_gmt":"2005-10-05T00:13:24","slug":"genericide_xeroxing_photoshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/05\/genericide_xeroxing_photoshop\/","title":{"rendered":"Genericide: Xeroxing "Photoshop""},"content":{"rendered":"

Photoshop was big in pop culture last weekend: on both The West Wing<\/i> and Desperate Housewives<\/i>, I’m told, characters mentioned Photoshop by name. Right on. The only catch: the West Wing<\/i> character asked someone to “Photoshop” something out of picture.
\nYou might think Adobe would be all for the verbing of “Photoshop,” but that’s not the case<\/a>. It turns out that if a company doesn’t actively protect a trademarked name, it can lose the rights to it. That’s why you see TiVo<\/a> and many others having to advocate mouth-twisting usages like, “Honey, would you record ‘Extreme Deathmatch 9000’ on the TiVo\u00ae DVR?” (You’re not even supposed to call the beloved plastic things “Legos<\/a>.”)
\nI’ve been asked several times for the technical term for the process of a product name getting, er, generified, and it seems there isn’t a proper one<\/a>. That said, “Genericide<\/a>” seems reasonable.
\nOn a related note, see if you can guess what’s indicated by this infographic<\/a>. (Where I grew up in Illinois, it was pronounced “paahp.”)
\nOh, and one last thing: Friends don’t let friends put a capital “S” in the middle of “Photoshop.” That usage really waves the nitwit flag, you know? :-).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photoshop was big in pop culture last weekend: on both The West Wing and Desperate Housewives, I’m told, characters mentioned Photoshop by name. Right on. The only catch: the West Wing character asked someone to “Photoshop” something out of picture. You might think Adobe would be all for the verbing of “Photoshop,” but that’s not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10961"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}