May Linkfest

Trademark

“When Simon Tam dropped out of college in California and moved to Portland, Ore., to become a rock star, the last tangle he imagined falling into was a multiyear battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over his band’s name.” The trademark tussle over “The Slants,” which the USPTO has deemed “disparaging” and thus ineligible for protection. (For a more technical perspective, see this Brent Lorentz post at Duets Blog.)

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“Your mission statement shouldn’t necessarily be the same thing as your trademark.” Trademark lawyer Jessica Stone Levy on why companies should think twice before registering names like Food Should Taste Good and WannaBettaButt?

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“Falling in love with an internal development name prior to completing a full trademark search and legal review is one of the most common problems companies encounter.” Trademark lawyer Tara Benson on avoiding trademark pitfalls. 

 

Science

What is the Moon’s real name? (Hat tip: Michele Hush.)

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Look for more alphanumeric names like H1N1: The World Health Organization gets tough on disease-naming. 

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Profanity

“You go to their Twitter profile: ‘I’m passionate about brands!’ You’re what? Dude, get a fucking girlfriend.” Veteran adman Bob Hoffman on why we’re living in the golden age of bullshit in advertising and marketing. (Video)

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How and why Lexicon, one of the world’s most influential branding and naming agencies, developed its first iPhone app: a profanity checker.

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“Though badass is historically associated with male pugnacity, perhaps the most striking change is that the word is now often used by and about women.” Jesse Sheidlower—a lexicographer and author of The F Word—tracks the history and soaring popularity of an all-purpose descriptor. (I wrote about badass in brand names in 2012.)

 

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Words and Language

“Webster was a visionary—even a radical—so far ahead of his time, in fact, that grammar and style guides are only now catching up with him.” Linguist Rosemarie Ostler on why Noah Webster, “the founding father of American English,” would have loved Urban Dictionary. (Hat tip: MJF.)

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The strange charm of cutthroat compounds like pickpocket, scarecrow, and, well, cutthroat: Stan Carey on these rare English words “that have a long, colourful history and constitute a very interesting category.” (I wonder how the newish fondleslab fits in?)

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Dictionary.com—offices right here in Oakland!—is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Its latest additions to the word-hoard include anecdata, microaggression, haptics, and a couple of Fritinancy favorites: dox and astroturfing.

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Taglines

“Finding a quick description that was also consumer friendly was exceedingly difficult. But when the founders did come up with the right tagline, the effort was well worth it: ‘The moment we started using the right language, it was like night and day.’ How the right tagline helped turn luxury-products company Cuyana around.

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Baby names

The 2014 Social Security Administration stats on baby names are out, and the Baby Name Wizard blog has discovered some interesting trends in the data. The biggest trend? What naming expert Laura Wattenberg calls “the great smoothing of American baby names”: goodbye “chunky” names (Jayden, Jessica), hello “silky,” vowel-rich names (Amanda, Mia, Noah, Liam).

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Speaking of popular names, here’s a fun tool to discover what your “today baby name” would be, based on the ranking of your own name in the year you were born. The tools works backward too: If I’d been born in the 1890s, chances are I’d have been named Minnie. More than a time-waster, the tool can be a big help in character-naming. (May take a while for the tool to load.)

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Advertising

“She originally went by Flo White, then Lord of the Strings. She eventually settled on the Period Fairy. It was more straightforward.” A new ad from category-busing Hello Flo, which sells a Period Starter Kit to adolescent girls.

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Errata

Which words are most commonly misspelled? Readers of the Lingua Franca blog speak up.

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A new plaque at AT&T Park honoring San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner commits two punctuation errors (apostrophe, hyphen) in the first line. Another reminder, as if we needed one, that it pays to hire a proofreader before casting that encomium in bronze.

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Name of the Year

Which will it be: Lancelot Supersad, Jr., or Amanda Miranda Panda? There’s still time to cast your vote.

Comments

[Brianne Hughes]

Re: FONDLESLAB. It is made of verb+noun, but SLAB is the head of the compound (not the direct object of the verb), and it's not a "thing that fondles slabs," so it's not a cutthroat. If the child in the photo using the tablet were called a fondleslab, it would be a cutthroat. In any case, it's a fun compound.

I hadn't heard about The Slants court case. It sounds like a tangled legal puzzle, getting the right result for the right reason.

I can't believe Infinite Grover didn't win Name of the Year. :/

[Hugo]

Fondleslab is quite surely a coinage by The Register, it's very much their style.

I also found an earlier El Reg citation from January 2010 when I wrote up its Wiktionary entry:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fondleslab