Trademarking "Dia De Los Muertos"

8 May 2013

This is a bit off topic for wordorigins.org, but I’ve addressed intellectual property issues before, and while I mostly focus on copyright, distinguishing between copyright and trademark is an important thing to do—especially if you’re a reporter writing a story about it.

Disney’s Pixar Studios has an upcoming film based on the Mexican cultural celebration, and Disney made an initial effort to trademark the phrase Día de los Muertos and several other movie related terms and images. After the public outcry, Disney announced they were withdrawing the trademark application.

Let me make clear, Disney’s attempt to create trademarks around Día de los Muertos was a very bad idea, but only because the reaction to it was so predictable. People were bound to assume that Disney was trying to “steal” a cultural tradition. You even got respectable outlets like Language Log publishing an article titled “Is Christmas Next?” It’s purely a public relations problem, not an example of an evil corporation attempting to appropriate a cultural tradition. Not that I don’t think Disney is capable of doing bad things—it has, for example, a reputation in Hollywood as a horrible place to work—but in this case I don’t think Disney intended anything nefarious.

The problem is that people don’t know what a trademark is. They confuse it with patents and copyrights, but it’s really quite different. Trademark law is essentially a consumer protection measure that ensures that products and services are labeled in such a way that one doesn’t confuse one company’s products with another. Trademark is not “ownership,” like copyright or patent. Disney, if had been successful in its trademark bid, it could not have prevented people from celebrating the holiday, or collected royalties from those that did. All it could do under trademark law would be to prevent people from making knock-off products and duping consumers. Trademark law protects a company’s profits from being poached by manufacturers of cheap knock-offs, and it protects consumers by ensuring they’re not mistakenly buying an inferior product. When trademarks are associated with widely known phrases, like Día de los Muertos, the trademark is usually limited to a specific graphical and typographical reproductions. In other words, other companies can still sell Día de los Muertos products, they just can’t label them in the same manner as the Disney movie and its associated products are labeled.

This is a case where a company took what was legally the correct course of action, but which was an incredibly stupid thing to do. Situations like this arise when you put lawyers in charge with no checks on their authority. Lawyers do what’s best for their client under the law, not necessarily what is smart.

[Addition: Svinyard118 makes an excellent point in the comments which I probably should have included when I originally wrote this post. The degree to which Disney’s action truly is objectionable depends on the scope of the trademark claim, which we don’t really know. (We know the categories of products that fall under Disney’s claim, which are numerous and broad, but we don’t know exactly what Disney was trying to trademark.) I assumed that the claim was that the phrase “Día de los Muertos” itself is not trademarked, but that Disney was only trying to trademark specific graphical representations of the phrase, as is typically the case when someone tries to trademark a term or phrase that is in common use. It’s possible that Disney threw out a wider net, claiming that all uses of the phrase in relation to marketing products in a number of broad categories is trademarked, which would be an evil act. Such a wide claim would likely not stand up to a legal challenge, but few companies have the deep pockets needed to go head-to-head with Disney in court, so a wide claim might work.

A Surfeit of Canadian Slang

5 May 2013

There is a particular genre of news article in which a columnist attempts to pack in as many slang words into the available space as possible. The news “value” of such an article is that it supposedly shows “how weird our language is” or “what the cool kids are saying.” In actuality, there is little value in the articles. They’re usually written by going through lists of slang terms and constructing sentences that use as many of the words as possible, so language researchers find little value in them. And, since no one in the real world ever uses so many slang terms at once, these articles give a false impression of how slang is actually used. In real speech, when one comes across an unfamiliar slang term, it’s meaning can usually be deduced from the context. By packing in as many weird words as possible, all context is lost. If there was any context to begin with, since, after all, the point of the article is to make use of random words.

Yet, these articles can be fun.

One such appeared yesterday in The National Post by Dave Bidini that features Canadian slang and regionalisms. A sample from the opening paragraph:

I got off the chesterfield, threw on my old housecoat and thongs, hucked a forty pounder, half-sack of swish and mickey of goof in a Loblaws bag over my shoulder before leaving my bachelor apartment to head due west past fire halls and hydros and parkades and corner stores in the direction of Dead Rear, Oilberta looking for some kind of joe job — cleaning eavestroughs; stitching hockey sweaters; packing Smarties; anything! — although damned if I knew whether I would find work once I got there.

I’ve been living in Canada for almost three years now. I can understand roughly half of the article.

Interactive Map of San Francisco Toponyms

30 April 2013

Noah Veltman, a Knight-Mozilla News Fellow at the BBC, has created an interactive map that displays the origin of place names (mostly street names) in San Francisco. It’s well-designed and easy to use.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy, which is notoriously difficult to achieve with toponymic etymologies, but if the account in this KQED article is correct, it’s probably as accurate as can be: “Reliability was an issue, he said. He tried to cross-check all his facts, because often one source would tell one story and another source would tell it slightly differently. ‘It’s a lot of just manual legwork,” Veltman said. “Looking at old archives, school books, old newspaper articles from The Chronicle, checking out historical society pages. There were certainly no shortcuts.’”

[Tip o’ the Hat to Mic Michelsen]

Review: How to Write an Essay in Five Easy Steps

18 April 2013

How to Write an Essay in Five Easy Steps
Scribendi (Karen Ashford), $2.99 (Kindle e-book)

I’m always on the lookout for good sources of writing advice that I can pass on to my students. So when given the opportunity to review How to Write an Essay in Five Easy Steps I jumped at the chance. (Like most reviews, I get a free copy.) Unfortunately, while this book is adequate, it does not offer much that is new or that makes it stand out from the crowd. It is filled with run-of-the-mill advice that you can find just about anywhere.

First, let me start off by questioning the utility of a book about how to write undergraduate essays. I’m not certain this is the right format. How many of the target audience will sit down and read a book about how to write an essay? Granted the book is short and the e-book format is welcome, but my experience is that students will not read such a book, or at least the ones that need it won’t. I have a secret suspicion that the real market for books like this is people who already know how to write.

Okay, on to the pluses. The biggest is the price. At $2.99 this book is priced well, especially as its chief competition is free web sites that offer essentially the same advice. (Another drawback of the book format.) As I mentioned, the book is short and concise, with little wasted verbiage. Ms. Ashford has boiled essay writing down to some basic points, and that is welcome.

In the space between pluses and minuses, the book offers conventional advice. For example, the five steps are: determining the requirements; researching; organizing; writing; and revising. Not exactly a bold and innovative approach. On one hand this conventional approach isn’t bad. Writing advice isn’t exactly cutting edge research. There is little that can be said on the subject that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. On the other hand, there is little that makes this book stand out.

At one point Ms. Ashford offers up a list of “general resources,” which include: The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World; CQ Researcher; Political Handbook of the World; Index to International Public Opinion; and World Opinion Update. These are fine resources if you are writing an essay for a political science class, but aren’t very useful for other disciplines. I suspect that the material was originally targeted for political science classes. Perhaps it would have been better to retain that narrower focus. Writing for different academic disciplines requires different approaches, and it’s more likely the book will say something new and innovative if it restricts itself to a particular type of academic writing.

(The book is also Canadian, and readers in the States may become confused when Ms. Ashford discusses grades, as the standard Canadian grading scale is different from that south of the border. For example, she says that a grade of 92% is an A+, which is true in Canada, but would be an A– in the States. Like the offering of political science resources, this is another example where a tighter focus, or smarter editing, could make the work more useful.)

Where the book fails is in its offering of absolute advice. There are few absolutes in good writing, but this book continually makes them. The thesis statement “needs to be approximately 15 words or less,” and “you MUST explain what the paper is about and give a preview of your arguments.” And one should “NEVER start the body of your essay without having explained your thesis.” In the main body, “you should use three arguments.” These are reasonable pieces of advice, but they’re not hard and fast rules. A thesis statement should be concise, but limiting to fifteen words may only serve to produce an essay that makes a simplistic argument. Sophisticated theses may need to be considerably longer. While most good essays do state the thesis up front, sometimes it is effective to build the argument and only reveal the thesis in the conclusion, or at a point in the middle. Such essays are harder to write, but when they work they can be extremely effective. (Be suspicious of any writing advice that uses “never” or “always,” for there will always be exceptions.) As to using three arguments, you should use as many arguments as you need to make your point.

So what this book aims to produce is the “hamburger” essay—consisting of layers of introduction, three-point argument, and conclusion. Like the food, a hamburger essay is palatable, but hardly gourmet. There is nothing wrong with offering the hamburger essay as a basic approach (and the format is especially useful for in-class tests and assignments, where time is limited), but the book should stress that this is a basic, fast-and-dirty approach, useful if you’re shooting for a B.

On occasion the book confuses grammatical terms, at one point writing “stick to the rule that personal pronouns should always be avoided.” That’s a howler. It might be easier, and just as arbitrary, to write an essay avoiding the letter E than write one without any personal pronouns (e.g., he, she, it). I think what Ms. Ashford meant was to avoid first-person pronouns (e.g., I, me, my). While it’s true that academic essays should avoid being personal reflections on the subject, the idea that first-person pronouns are verboten is outmoded, if it ever really applied at all. For example my favorite example of academic writing, which I usually use to express the value of understating a conclusion, uses personal pronouns. It’s from Watson and Crick’s 1953 “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids” in Nature: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” Sometimes first-person pronouns (and understatement) pack punch. Of course, if one’s professor or TA arbitrarily forbids their use, it would be wise to obey the stricture. But otherwise, judicious use of the first person is a perfectly legitimate way to go.

How to Write an Essay in Five Easy Steps isn’t a bad book, it’s just not a particularly good one. Like the hamburger format it proffers, the book has taken writing advice, run it through the grinder, and produced a mediocre product. At $2.99 it may be worth a shot for a student who is having trouble writing, but there are probably better resources out there for free.

DARE Needs Your Support

8 April 2013

The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is the crown jewel of North American lexicography. It’s a six-volume dictionary of regionalisms gathered from across the United States. The sixth and final volume was published this year, but its work is not yet done. The dictionary’s staff is hard at work creating a digital version that will not only make the work more accessible, but will be the home for future updates and additions. Or would be except DARE’s work has been threatened by a sudden loss of funding. The foundation that has long funded the project has declined to renew the grant, and the University of Wisconsin, where the dictionary is housed, is itself in severe financial straits due to cuts in government funding.

DARE editor Joan Houston Hall reports that the staff will be laid off as of July and that her own position disappears in January. The dictionary is on life support and reduced to begging for scraps in order to stay alive long enough to win another grant.

If you are able to contribute, you can do so here.