Policing the language
No, I don’t mean the political corectness police (although they are as officious and interfering as ever). I am referring to Google and Apple. I mentioned previously that Google is not pleased to have become a dictionary entry. Now Apple is trying to lock up the use of “pod”. Matthew Lynn, a columnist at Bloomberg.com, comments
Google, based in Mountain View, California, is policing the use of its name. In one case, the founder of the WordSpy Web site received a letter warning him against defining it as a verb for generally finding out stuff about a person on the Internet.
And at Apple, humor is in similarly short supply. The company has started cracking down on the use of the word “pod,” on the grounds that it infringes the trademark on its iPod music player. Its targets have included TightPod, a laptop-cover brand name of Medford, New Jersey-based Terryfic.com.
Mr. Lynn recounts some other corporate attempts to control how we use words and says
Words that were once corporate have been entering the language for decades. We hoover the floor, and xerox documents. And let’s not forget that giant of the Victorian plumbing industry, Thomas Crapper & Co.
Now, if somebody could just explain to me how Microsoft managed to take an ordinary generic word like windows and turn it into a trademark that they defend with legions of lawyers.
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