It’s Week Eleventy-Kajillion of the COVID pandemic and we’re headed into the long Labor Day weekend here, and then the Jewish New Year. I have no amusing stories about names and brands today; instead, here are a few things I’ve been reading (and stewing over) that you may find interesting.
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There’s lower-case nil, a contraction of Latin nihil, which means “nothing,” especially in British and Commonwealth sports scores and doctor’s orders (“nil by mouth,” also the title of a 1987 British film directed by Gary Oldman).
Then there’s the acronym NIL, which in the world of U.S. collegiate athletics stands for “name, image, likeness.” And that NIL is a very big something.
Until recently, college athletes in the U.S. were prohibited by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) from cashing in on their names, images, and likenesses—their NIL. On July 1, 2021, new laws went into effect in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and New Mexico that allow athletes at those states’ universities to “monetize their individual rights,” as a June 15 story in Sports Business Journal put it.
Promotion for “The N.I.L. Era,” a November 11, 2020, webinar presented by SporticoLive.
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Earlier this month, the US Supreme Court heard arguments (by telephone, because of the COVID-19 pandemic) in a case with special interest for those of us who follow developments in naming and trademark law. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office vs. Booking.com, the case argued on May 4, is the culmination of eight years of efforts by Booking.com, which calls itself “the world’s #1 choice for booking hotel accommodations,” to register its full name, including the .com, as a US trademark. My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus gives you a sense of what’s at stake by examining some key terms, including generic, domain, and, yes, booking.
The Booking.com wordmark
Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers (still just $19.95 a year!). Here’s an excerpt:
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: The case of the generic name" »
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How much are you suffering under your locality’s COVID-19 restrictions? If you’re reading this, I assume you aren’t running a fever or hooked up to a ventilator but are instead working from home or, if you’re fortunate, collecting unemployment. (Or, if you’re not fortunate, not collecting unemployment because you were self-employed or minimally employed.) Your gym/golf course/favorite restaurant has been closed for weeks; graduations, proms, and sports have been canceled; you can shop only for essentials, you’ve learned how to create makeshift face masks; and you’re washing your hands more than you’d ever dreamed possible.
Maybe you’d call this situation inconvenient. Or stressful. Or tough but necessary if we’re going to flatten the curve and save the lives of our fellow citizens.
On the other hand, maybe you self-identify as a member of the hard-core-individualist, expert-scorning, no-patience-with-patience slice of the Don’t-Tread-on-Me American populace. In that case, maybe you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take any more government interference in your God-given liberties, not for any damn virus, nosiree. You’re calling the situation draconian.
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October 2019 marks the centenary of the Volstead Act, the federal legislation that led to the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution—and to the misguided 13-year social experiment known as Prohibition. From January 1, 1920, until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933, the manufacture, sale, and importation of “intoxicating liquors” were officially outlawed. As everyone knows, all of those activities flourished illicitly.
And so did new vocabulary items.
I’m celebrating the anniversary—and the vocabulary—in my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Sidecars and Scofflaws: Prohibition’s Linguistic Hangover.” Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt.
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: Prohibition's linguistic hangover" »
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To be or not to be a stool pigeon? That is the “existential” question facing Hope Hicks, a former communications director at the Trump White House, according to the lede of a May 24 New York Times story:
One of the best-known but least visible former members of President Trump’s White House staff is facing an existential question: whether to comply with a congressional subpoena in the coming weeks.
Print edition: Hicks at night, flanked by reporters and overshadowed by the White House, whose employ she voluntarily left on March 29, 2018, a month after giving nine hours of closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee.
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The headline on this April 4 Guardian story is a little premature.
“‘Veggie discs’ to replace veggie burgers”? Not so fast.
The “crackdown”—a ban on producers of vegetarian food using nomenclature usually deployed to describe meat, such as “burger,” “steak,” and “sausage”—was in fact passed by the EU parliament’s agriculture committee, but to become law it must be approved the full parliament and then by member states and the European commission. The push “to protect meat-related terms and names ‘exclusively for edible parts of the animals’” has been opposed by some vegetarian-leaning NGOs, including Greenpeace and Birdlife.
“Veggie disc,” noted the Guardian with a soupçon of dry wit, “has emerged as one possible, yet possibly unpalatable, new name for plant-based burgers.”
Still, it’s worth taking a look at the way we talk about and brand plant-based substitutes for meat, which are becoming an increasingly mainstream part of North American and European diets.
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In U.S. and Canadian law, there’s a long-established* practice of using “Jane Doe” or “John Doe” to refer to a person whose name is unknown or must be withheld. Placeholder names like these are called kadigans, and it turns out there are legal kadigans for parcels of real property as well. The primary such placeholder name is Blackacre; if two parcels of property are being compared, the second is usually called Whiteacre.
This is where I confess that while I’d known about Jane and John Doe for a long time, I first encountered “Blackacre” less than a week ago, by way of a clever tweet from Kathryn Rubino, an editor at the Above the Law blog.
Blackacre-ish #nameacivillawTVshow
— Kathryn Rubino (@Kathryn1) November 2, 2017
(Fans of legal puns can find more like this on Kathryn’s Twitter timeline.)
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Suppose you built a condominium building in a certain Manhattan neighborhood and named it for an adjacent but different Manhattan neighborhood. Suppose the zoning laws wouldn’t allow a residential tower on the site, so what you actually were selling were rooms in a “condo-hotel.” Suppose you publicly claimed that 60 percent of the units had been sold when in fact the figure was 15.8 percent.
What to call these inaccurate public statements: Lies? Fraud?
Try puffery.
“World’s finest”? Hardly.
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Last week, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to reinstate the Trump Administration’s ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, I began seeing references to a new-to-me legal blog with an interesting name: Lawfare.
LAWFARE: "Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute." A disgraceful decision!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2017
Clever, I thought: a blend of law and warfare. But how did the Non-Reader-in-Chief happen to hear about it? Not much of a mystery:
I was curious how Trump heard of Lawfare. Well, he saw it on TV, of course. https://t.co/XSSpeAK7yd
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) February 10, 2017
I’ll get back to the Lawfare blog – and the post that caused that day’s Trumpertantrum – in a bit. First, though, here’s what I learned after doing a little homework: The word lawfare wasn’t coined by the Lawfare blog. And it’s had an interesting, decades-long history.
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