Duck Tape Duct Tape

I know a certain journalism major who is pretty good at helping me proof my blog posts. She is on top of things when it comes to proofing, having been a copy editor in a past life, and pointed out that one of my quiz answers - 'Duck Tape' - was incorrect.

"It's DUCT tape, not duck tape... hahahah," she told me. I replied, "Yeah, I know it's 'd-u-c-t', but there's a brand that is specifically called 'd-u-c-k' tape." (I purposefully thought about the brand name when I put up the quiz answer.)

This got me thinking... I use brand names all of the time (sometimes to my mother's horror when they're competing brands with 3M products), like Band-Aid, Kleenex, ChapStick, and Post-It, instead of their actual product names like bandage, tissue, lip balm, and sticky note, respectively. Have I been saying and writing the wrong thing all of this time when I use the word "Vaseline" instead of "petroleum jelly"? (Seriously - who wants to say "petroleum jelly"?)

I think I generally write coherently, but I still make grammar mistakes all of the time. I break grammar rules regularly - sometimes out of ignorance, other times out of laziness. I like that other people can remember the correct way to use the English language, especially since I'm no expert.

I remember having to memorize rules from the MLA Handbook in college. In fact, along with my Great Books literature, it was the only non-technical book that survived the post final exam resell. I used that thing fairly regularly even after finishing up my English comp. courses. (Someone had to know how to cite references in a research paper for my senior design class). Sadly, a lot of it has been forgotten and I regularly look up words on dictionary.com and Wikipedia - unless I'm too lazy or don't know any better, then it just gets posted incorrectly.

I hyphenate words regularly, without a clue as to whether it's correct or not. I misspell (actually - I just misspelled misspell... thanks spell check!) and use the wrong homonym, hoping that at least the words in the blog titles are correct. I also tend to write how I talk/think, and use way more parenthesis than anyone else I know. (Honestly, do I really need four or more side notes in parentheses per post?)

Maybe the brand name isn't technically the correct term, but I'm not too worried about it. Engineers aren't generally known for their skills with the English language, so maybe that's why it doesn't bother me too much when I've made a few grammatical errors. Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not the only one who uses brand names this way.