Genericisms

When’s the last time you heard someone say, “let’s Skype”?

Skype used to be a verb, but now it’s not. Instead, we talk about Zooming one another, having replaced one semi-popular platform with an incredibly well-known new paradigm.

Skype is a trademark owned by Microsoft. When a trademark makes the leap from being the specific name of one particular product to a more general term for every similar product, that’s called a generic trademark, or genericization for short.

Sometimes a genericization will happen and a word will be widely adopted, only to see it replaced by another brand. That’s what happened with Zoom and Skype around 2020. Skype was only popular as a term for a few years, but it was around long enough for me to hear it become a very dominant verb.

This happened to the term Walkman during the early 2000s. When Apple released the iPod, it wasn’t a clean, instant replacement for the term Sony had come up with in 1979. Walkmans were huge in the 80s—certainly a big part of my mus…