As an American growing up in the late 70s/early 80s, we called all die-cast metal cars “matchbox cars,” even though many (all?) of them were Hot Wheels. I never knew there were two competing brands.
The Chiclets name is derived from the Mexican Spanish word "chicle", derived from the Aztec Nahuatl word "chictli/tzictli", meaning "sticky stuff" and referring to a pre-Columbian chewing gum found throughout Mesoamerica. This pre-Columbian chewing gum was tapped as a sap from various trees.
I'm French and I didn't know that Maizena is a brand of cornstarch instead of a generic product called maizena... So that is why it I always thought it was so similar to cornstarch !
I grew up in the Eastern block and I remember my grandma's set of Rotring mechanical pens (with ink) was promised to me the day I turned 18 but I so wanted that set when I was much younger (in fact at an age I was still playing with Matchbox cars). As I remember they were very finnicky and needed to be declogged quite frequently.
In Australia cooler boxes are known as an Esky (chilly bin in New Zealand), Weber for charcoal barbecues, Texta for felt-tip pens – there's probably a whole lot more I'm not remembering.
In hungary trash bins are called "kuka" after the brand name of Keller und Knappich Augsburg (the makers of those nice orange robot arms) become genericized.
I was shocked when I first started participating in discussions on-line on international boards like this one, some 10+ years ago, and discovered that in America, you sneeze into a Kleenex and cut stuff with X-Acto knives.
Then again, we've been calling a certain class of shoes "Adidas" since 1990s, so I shouldn't be surprised by the phenomenon. Not to mention, I don't think anyone in Poland ever used the generic term for a photocopier - we all call it "ksero" machines (from Xerox).
I did grow up on the eastern block (not Poland) and we also called Adidas shoes a type of sneakers that could be a different brand, it was the style that we called them like that. There were a lot more genericized trademarks/eponyms. I can think of two more: one for Blue Jeans which sounded something like "blu Gee" (from blue jeans) and "Jeep" which we called any car that looked like a Jeep but of any brand.
> X-Acto knives are a specific type of knives, builder's or craftsman's, not chef's.
Right, but that's still a quite large and generic product category, produced by many manufacturers and sold by many vendors - while "X-Acto" is a specific US brand of a specific US company.
> Equally, a Bic is not any ball pen at all, but a specific inexpensive, usually faceted kind, AFAICT.
Yeah, here we didn't call random ballpoint pens "Bic" - the name was used to refer to only to the specific brand of cheap and shitty orange pens that were easy to find anywhere and which no one wanted to use.
> Xerox, on the other hand, were the original inventors of the particular photocopy process.
Here it's long been a verb. You don't copy documents, you xero documents.
Growing up in the 1960s we called them all Dinky Toys. Dinky was the best: they even had die-cast UFO SHADO interceptors and Space:1999 Eagles in the 1970s when I was too old for such things (but still secretly coveted them).
