Why you can google, but not photoshop

Though it’s somewhat off-topic, I can’t resist to discuss a little gem of corporate grammar prescriptivism here that I recently discovered on Adobe’s website. Believe me, most of the “rules” put forth there are enough to give any seasoned grammarian an aneurysm, not so much because of what they forbid, but because they seriously confuse grammatical categories.

Let’s have a look.

Trademarks are not nouns.

They most certainly are. Just look at this sentence from Adobe’s main page:

Download Adobe Reader and Flash Player.

Note that it would have to read Download Adobe® Reader® software and Flash® Player® software if Adobe followed its own rules.

Trademarks are proper adjectives and should be followed by the generic terms they describe.

Ouch. Trademarks are certainly not proper adjectives. It’s not terribly difficult to figure out where the confusion comes from, though. Take the phrase New York pizza - would you describe New York as an adjective in this example? Hardly. Adjectives often modify nouns, as in the white bunny, a happy student etc. But that doesn’t mean that anything that can modify a noun actually is an adjective.

We are also warned about abbreviating trademarks and using them as “slang terms”. The two sentences used as examples of slang actually manifest what linguists call conversion, the process of coining a new word by copying an existing form from another word class (see the etymology of “to edit” for the description of a related process, the back formation).

Now, of course there’s a sane and absolutely pragmatic reason for this fixation on the “proper” use of trademarks. Companies fear what’s called genericide, the association of a brand name with a generic object, as opposed to one specific product. The result of genericide can be the loss of a trademark, though this does not occur often.

A certain degree of generification is basically unavoidable if your product dominates the market and/or describes a new thing or activity (hoover became generic in the U.K. for those reasons). Photoshop I’m sorry, Adobe® Photoshop® software has a similar dominance in the market and is used for an activity that wasn’t popular or terribly common before its advent.

Funny thing is, the good folks at Adobe seem to have trouble following their own advice, probably because “photoshopping something” seems and awful lot more efficient than “using Adobe® Photoshop® software to manipulate images” (we humans like our language short and sweet).

Have a look here (last sentence) and here (in quotes). Looks like John Nack’s primer on trademark misuse was in vain. How do I know? I googled it.

(For an in-depth linguistic assessment by a real expert, read Geoffrey K. Pullum’s post on Language Log.)