Re: "To Home"--could have been of German or English heritage, I would think; do they say it in Canada (which is near Minnesota)? Or maybe I didn't know enough Pennsylvania Dutch [Deutsche] when I was a kid.

Hmmm.

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I'm laughing at how occupations can mess up one's vocabulary. I work in an archive. We don't have a lot of Xeroxes but we break things down into photostatic copies, xerographic copies [from which Xerox derives its name], etc., which age and have to be preserved differently.

Wikipedia list of genericized tradenames. I notice that they omitted "heroin", though.