The Tab key works beautifully. Thanks.

Pat, I think the concern a lot of companies have about brand names being adopted as generic terms is that the courts may rule that the name should lose its trademark protection. Hence, there would be nothing to stop a dozen companies selling their tissues as "kleenex", so the original maker would lose the advantage of the brand name.

Spot on. Which is why companies vigorously fight dilution of their trademark.

Some years ago, Intel lost a battle to trademark the x86 for its CPUs (which is why they introduced the name 'Pentium') -- court said numbers couldn't be trademarked. I suspect Google might have had a similar rejection of an attempt to trademark googol. Perhaps that is why they didn't even try.

Well they always say the best things come in small packages, Linda! Being an average 5'4" I missed the boat!

Since my mother, sisters, wife, and daughters average about 5'7", I'd say 5'4" is a bit titchy!

Re the Character Map in Windows -- changing the font will change available characters because some fonts have more characters than others. Except the dingbat-type fonts, most every font will have Latin characters, but with other type characters the variations can be quite large.

Click 'Advanced View', then change the 'Group by' from 'All' to 'Unicode Subrange' to open a box which allows you to see characters by logical classifications. One might be surprised by what is available.

An interesting point of view, TRex, but if you learn to speak in a different, presumably 'better', way, aren't you pretending to be something you're not, which, by definition, means you're being pretentious? You may consider it justifiable in the circumstances, but it's still pretentiousness.

I suspect we may be using pretentious differently. I don't understand it as a synonym for pretending, but as having a connotation of falseness, ostentatiousness, and pomposity.

In the case of someone coming from a poor socio-economic background surrounded by sub-standard English, who has learnt to speak good standard English and shed the sub-standard English (so the person isn't even pretending when using educated English), I wouldn't use pretentious. If I had to apply a word describing the transition, I'd say the person had become educated.

In the past, I remember seeing a book giving standard pronunciations for words, especially proper names, which were supposed to be used by broadcasters/anchormen/etc.

The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary edited by J. C. Wells. I have a 2000 edition which has pronunciation for both English and American and variants.

I suggest adding bleah.