"Nixie"s [was Re: strange remark about your collection?]

Burroughs - or whoever owns the rights these days - does not get to dictate how people use language, except to a very limited extent language as used in trade (trademark law has no applicability, in any jurisdiction as far as I know, to informal conversations such as this and other non-trade contexts). Even the Wikipedia page Nixie_tube (which, while no more authoritative than any Wikipedia page for facts, is, I think, a valid example of how language actually gets used) illustrates this. Its definition, as of this writing, does not include any mention of the term being a trademark, and the page uses the term in ways blatantly incompatible with the trademark definition: "Some Russian Nixies, e.g. the IN-14"..."In the former Soviet Union, Nixies were still being manufactured in volume in the 1980s, so Russian and Eastern European Nixies are still available". It mentions that "Burroughs...owned the name Nixie as a trademark" (not `owns'), and even goes so far as to remark "the phrase Nixie tube quickly entered the vernacular as a generic name" and include a see-also link to the Genericized_trademark page, so clearly _someone_ (besides me) thinks it's been substantially genericized already. Indeed, that we're even _having_ this conversation seems to me to support that position. I also am inclined to wonder what jurisdictions Burroughs trademarked `Nixie' in; it strikes me as quite possible that in many listmembers' jurisdictions it has never been a trademark. (I haven't bothered looking up whether mine is one of them because I don't consider it relevant to my main point.) Perhaps the detail that the term was trademarked in some jurisdictions is in danger of being lost to all but historians. I'm not convinced that's a bad thing; this has happened to many trademarks (the Genericized_trademark Wikipedia page mentioned above has examples) and I don't see the world as being any the worse for it. Nor do I see anyone as being worse off if "Nixie" goes generic, probably even including whoever owns its trademark rights now (presumably Unisys), especially since they do not appear to care any longer about either the name or the product. Probably not. But I would not suggest doing it with that goal. I rather was trying to say that I suspect it has already been done for some other reason (possibly even just "because I can" - as you remark, it'd be cool to do in its own right), though almost certainly not very often. Jeri Ellsworth, maybe? :) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B