Last week, Boing Boing featured a photograph of the 1959 Xerox 914 plain-paper copy machine, which Cory Doctorow notes churned out a modest hundred and thirty-six copies an hour and came equipped with a fire-extinguisher. Seeing that hulking, flammable beast reminded me first of my school days, when I did a good deal of book-reading via toner-soaked photocopies—book spines and the environment be damned. Much about that now seems quaint: the curved edges of the text condensing to unreadability back near the fold, the accidentally upside-down or out-of-order pages, those little coin slots on the machine and later the charge cards. Students and library users are still copying excerpts from books, but those days are getting more and more numbered.

The Xerox machine also reminded me of the company’s great contribution to the language, as over time the proper corporate noun came to take on general verb and noun properties. You can xerox something or pass out a xerox to the class. There are all kinds of such words that start out as brand names but end up in general usage—Kleenex, Kool-Aid, Walkman, Band-Aid, Q-tips. (Kudos to anyone proper enough to i.d. items in his or her medicine cabinet as facial tissues, adhesive bandages, or cotton swabs.) In fact, it’s long been one of my favored time-wasting group games to name as many as we can think of. It turns out such words have a name: proprietary eponyms. And thanks to this comprehensive list of such terms, the game is now spoiled. Some are familiar: AstroTurf, Breathalyzer, Frisbee. Others surprising: Skivvies, Dumpster, Sheetrock. Others have fallen out of wide use, though they’re still familiar: BVDs, Alka Seltzer, Palm Pilot. And then there is a notable category of now-defunct trademarks: Aspirin, Gunk, Tabloid, Kerosene, Heroin, Jungle Gym.

These words are great fun, mostly because they generate specificity (which is always a good thing), celebrate goofy alliteration (sometimes a good thing), and because they are packed with unique sounds and contain some of the more overlooked letters of the alphabet.

Photograph by jbcurio, Flickr CC.