Just do what I do and create new ones

by Tony Wilson

You have to really love words to do trademark law. Choosing a Mark, and then trying to distinguish it from others over something as trivial as a hyphen is something that could only appeal to word lovers. Truth be told, I love words so much, I have been known to create new ones when the need arises.

For instance, a few years ago, I coined the word “schadenfreudeh” in an article in Macleans magazine. The German word schadenfreude is generally well known and means the perverse pleasure some people feel at the misfortune of others. Many people feel a tinge of schadenfreude when the names Conrad Black and Martha Stewart are mentioned in the same sentence as “criminal indictment” and “crowbar hotel.” My word, schadenfreudeh (with the Canadian “eh” at the end so Mel Hurtig will put it in Canadian Encyclopedia), refers to the pleasure most of us on the Coast feel when our relatives in Eastern Canada are buried in snow in March and April while we’re golfing, sailing or gardening the winter away, and the subsequent phone calls we make to them about the flower count in Victoria, today’s golf score, or how much the Palm Tree grew last year.

Everyone named Bob knows that a palindrome is a word or phrase that’s the same spelled backwards or forwards. Lion Oil and Kayak are palindromes (as is Bob). But do you know what a portmanteau is? Well, it’s a blending or morphing of words; often where the prefix of one is combined with the suffix of another. Words like Clamato, Jazzercise, and Muppet are portmanteaus (as well as pretty good trademarks), whereas portmanteaus like brunch, McJob, motel, moped, smog, toonie, mockumentary, advertorial, infotainment and infomercial just seem to enter the language by osmosis. (“Metrotown”, by the way, is both a portmanteau and an oxymoron!)

New and interesting portmanteaus are created every day. For example, a nonebrity is a person with no talent or importance whatsoever who becomes a celebrity – perhaps by sleeping with the defendant while being a member of the jury trying him. Mimbo is the male equivalent of bimbo and a manziere is a bra for fat men. (Both originate from Seinfeld.) Affluenza means the physiological ailments that somehow come with having far too much money. A Bridezilla is a bad bride. A Ponis is a pony-tale for men. And if you read my October column, you know what a Kegmare is.

We can have some fun with portmanteaus in this profession. When I am in a heated phone call with a lawyer who is being an ass, I may be tempted to label his position as redonkulous (a position so ridiculous only a donkey would take it). I might well consider him an ignoranus. A client who you discover has been lying is a lient. Because my practice involves disputes between franchisors and franchisees, I have been describing myself as a solitigator for years.

Unlike French, which is guarded in France by the Académie Française and in Québec by the Police, in English, we’ll take anything if it works. Create a word, use it in a magazine column like this one or on the web, and sooner or later others will start using it too. In fact, Googlemark.org is dedicated to the registration of new words. It operates like a trademark registry for smart asses, and you get a certificate if you’re the first to register a word not found by God’s search engine.

Send me your best legal ones for a future column. But make sure you googlemark them first, or I will.

Tony Wilson is a Franchise Lawyer and Intellectual Property Lawyer at Boughton. He's written for the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, and Macleans magazine. E-mail: twilson@boughton.ca

This article was published in the April 2006 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2006, all rights reserved.