Using Trademarks in Your Conversation? Beware!
Google has released a guideline on how you can use the word “google”, and you are explicitly forbidden to use “google” as verb when you mean searching with an engine other than Google. Lorelle has also written a blog post to warn about using the word “WordPress”, as it is now a trademark of Automattic. I still can’t imagine myself saying “I googled and wordpressed about Yahoo today”.
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That’s exactly my point. The article somewhat implies that you can get in trouble for that if not used in the sense of “I went to Google and googled you today” but the fact of the matter is that no one could possibly police that.
But if you wrote a book and made a statement like, “I googled ‘carrot cake’ at Ask.com” then you could — and quite possibly should — be sued for it. You are all of the sudden profiting from someone else’s name while using it in an incorrect situation.
If you’ve ever owned a TM, you’d understand the need to protect your property. And the need to do so grows exponentially with the size and visibility of your company.
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Playground is the personal weblog of Scott Yang, a Chinese-Australian Christian who works as a software developer in Sydney Australia.
I can’t imagine using the term in conversation being an issue unless it is an integral part of a prepared speech, and you charge admission for the event. However, we Americans are known to mangle the English language (and even absorb words from other languages that eventually bear no resemblance to their root word), and one of the most common things we do is turn a noun into a verb, a verb into a noun, a noun into an adjective, etc. This is a great example of that, but I really see no possible ramifications in using it improperly in everyday conversation.