Lexical properties: Trademarks, dictionaries, and the sense of the generic

Abstract

The third edition of Webster's International Dictionary, first published in 1961, represented a novel approach to lexicography. It recorded the English language used in everyday life, incorporating colloquial terms that previous grammarians would have considered unfit for any responsible dictionary. Many were scandalized by the new lexicography. Trademark lawyers were not the most prominent of these critics, but the concerns they expressed are significant because they touched on the core structure of the trademark as a form of property in language. In the course of eavesdropping on everyday usage, Merriam-Webster's lexicographers picked up on the use of trademarks as common nouns: "thermos" as a generic noun for any vacuum flask, "cellophane" as a term for transparent wrapping, and so on. If Webster's Third were to be taken as sound evidence of the meaning of words, then the danger was that some of the most familiar marks in the USA would be judged "generic" in the legal sense, and would thereby cease to be proprietary. In this article, we explore the implications of this encounter between law and lexicographic technique.

Linguistic Analysis of Trademarks of Selected Buffet Restaurants in SM Mall of Asia, Manila

“…Butters (2010) emphasizes that "a meaning analysis of a trademark begins with the dictionary definitions of the component words and morphemes" (p. 357). Bellido and Pottage (2019) assert this point when they argue that dictionaries can help to identify if trademarks have lapsed into genericity, and "become non-proprietary common nouns; the best examples are words such as thermos, cellophane, frisbee, and escalator". Thus, the main use of dictionaries was "to determine whether a mark was, or had become, descriptive of goods" (p. 120).…”

“Technologies of the law/ law as a technology”

“…35 Finally, Bellido's and Pottage's contribution shows that the integral role of technology is not limited to patent law, and that trademark law as we know it would not exist without dictionaries -tools that, while eminently mundane, also provide a key test for the validity of trademarks by functioning as archives of genericness against which the mark's distinctiveness is to be judged. 36 The second half of our title -"law as technology" -may strike some readers as counterintuitive. No doubt, law as technology is less descriptive and more suggestive than "technologies of the law," but we do not treat it as metaphor either.…”