As a 20-year-old student of English I was sent to the US for a scholarship in practical journalism and it was then when I first painfully experienced how out of touch with reality textbook English we learned at school and at university was. Ever since the hardest part for me as an EFL speaker has been to see through local variations, both in accent, but maybe even more so in vocab and word choice. It's amazing how impenetrable English can get and how helpless its non-native users can become in the face of community idiosyncracies, with their unique labels for just about everything.
In an effort to tame this hostility of real, uncompromising English, it might be worth a while to pay extra attention to how common brands become everyday words, a process which isn't accounted for in the students' handbooks well enough in my jugdement. It's important because some of these trademarks are used to refer to the run-of-the-mill most learners should be aware of.
This dawned on me as I read DonDeLillo's "White Noise", which is sprinkled densely with such language. Some examples, not only from DeLillo:
1) velcro, a type of fastening with tiny hooks commonly used in clothing or bags,
2) day-glo, fluorescent paint, luminous in light, useful in articles like vests for construction workers,
3) tippex, a liquid used to neatly correct errors,
4) hoover, a vacuum cleaner,
5) biro, a ballpoint pen,
6) post-it notes, heavily used in offices around the world,
7) coke, short for Coca-cola,
8) go-ped,
9) lycra, a popular clothing fabric,
10) xerox, to photocopy.
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