Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: The case of the generic name

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:

Word of the week: Draconian

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.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Prohibition's linguistic hangover

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.

Word of the week: Existential

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.

Hold the burger

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.

Word of the week: Blackacre

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.)

Word of the week: Puffery

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.

  

Word of the week: Lawfare

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.

Word of the week: Upskirt

Upskirt: “A video, usually taken in a crowded location such as a shopping mall, that is shot up a woman’s skirt” without the woman’s permission or even knowledge. (Source: Word Spy)

In early May, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed a law criminalizing upskirting. Philly.com reported:

Noting concerns for protecting children and privacy in a “highly digital age,” the Republican governor said the law would target “perpetrators of a perverse and growing form of pornography that victimizes vulnerable women and children in a matter of seconds.”

New Jersey’s invasion-of-privacy law prohibits photographing, videotaping, or otherwise recording the image of another person whose intimate parts are exposed without that person's consent and under circumstances in which a reasonable person would not expect to be observed.

The “upskirting” law also makes it a crime to photograph, video, or record photos of clothed intimate parts of another person without consent and under circumstances in which a reasonable person would not expect to have his or her private body parts observed.

Under the new law, the act of photographing or recording those photos is a fourth-degree crime punishable by up to 18 months in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both, Christie's office said.

Five “upskirters” were arrested in Manhattan in April. The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance noted that incidences of upskirting increase as the weather grows warmer.

Urban Dictionary’s earliest entry for upskirting is from 2006, but Word Spy found a 1998 mention in the Washington Post:

What began as a small photo gallery on the Internet a couple of years ago has rapidly expanded to more than 40 such “Upskirt” sites, including one devoted entirely to shots taken up skirts in Maryland, said [Alexandria detective Harold] Duquette, who has been tracking the trend.

—Patricia Davis, “Video Peeping Toms Seeing More Trouble,” The Washington Post, June 7, 1998

 

Related: Downblouse.

Word of the Week: Laches

Laches: Negligence in the performance of a legal duty; delay in asserting a right, claiming a privilege, or making application for redress. “Laches is not to be confused with the ‘statute of limitations,’ which sets specific periods to file a lawsuit for types of claims (negligence, breach of contract, fraud, etc.)” – Law.com. Pronunciation is similar to “latches.”*