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.
