At 2:00 PM +0530 7/22/02, Madhu Menon wrote: >http://www.worldmusicsystems.com/news/newsdetails.asp?id=903&sid=11 > >Austrias highest court said that the name has already become a common >German noun that refers to all portable cassette players, including those >manufactured by companies other than Sony. Wow. German is an incredibly flexible language - almost as flexible as English. There are so many examples of this in US english (at the very least - I'm sure other flavors of english have the same phenomenon!). Sony really dropped the ball with the Duden dictionary though - they should have fixed it. They bear the burden of protecting their trademarks, right? bob -- bob davis bob at bobdavis.org http://www.bobdavis.org/